Reflections on measuring text reuse from a copyright law perspective

Abstract

Dr Paul Clough’s paper examines ways of measuring text re-use in respect of material produced by news agency services. It describes the METER project, a project which involved quantifying and measuring the probable reuse of Press Association (PA) material or ‘copy’ in specific stories by members of the British national press. The project used both manual techniques and computational models of measurement, although clearly the real interest is in developing the latter. These computational or automated methods of measuring text re-use could prove useful not only in the sphere of news agency services, but also in other contexts, such as copy-detection.As a UK copyright academic, I found Dr Clough’s research interesting in, broadly speaking, two main ways. First, I was struck by the similarities and differences between the concept of text re-use and that of UK copyright law. Second, I was interested in the role computational models of measuring text re-use might have in the copyright sphere.