A Luxembourg court has handed out a ruling against a Danish newspaper clipping company stating that its practice of printing “11-word snippets of news articles” is reproduction in part under European IP law. The ruling stated the court’s opinion on how actually printing the article segments is different from publishing them online. According to the court, actually publishing something makes it more permanent than having it online does.

That ruling seems sort of backwards to me. News archives online, especially those for very short stories (it’s not even fair to call these stories), are way better than physical ones. I doubt that people are going to save hard copies of eleven word snippets when they can just access the same data online. I’m at a loss for understanding the logic behind the decision. Rather than making sense, this ruling just seems to reaffirm the European trend of coming down against the internet just because the old guys who run the legal system don’t understand technology.

Still, this story is nowhere near as outrageous as a lot of other recent news. The company in question was printing partial copies of someone …

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