Amsterdam Court Sides With News Publishers Against Scraping Service HowardsHome

A Dutch appeals court has handed news publishers a significant victory in a dispute over the commercial scraping of their websites. On October 20, 2026, the Amsterdam Court of Appeal ruled that the media monitoring service HowardsHome infringed copyright and press publishers' rights belonging to DPG Media and Mediahuis.

The publishers announced the judgment this week. They say it carries lessons well beyond one company, including for artificial intelligence firms that collect news content from the web.

The Dispute

HowardsHome, operated by Knowledge Exchange B.V., offered news monitoring to organisations including the Dutch central government. According to the publishers, the service scraped tens of thousands of online news articles every day and sold clients alerts that each contained a headline, a short excerpt and often a small image.

DPG Media, which publishes titles including AD, de Volkskrant and NU.nl, and Mediahuis, publisher of De Telegraaf and NRC, said they tried several times to agree a licence. When talks failed, they went to court in 2023.

A Reversal on Appeal

The publishers lost at first instance. In a judgment of October 30, 2024, the Amsterdam District Court rejected all of their claims. It found that the alerts, which by then used snippets of about 150 characters, fell within the exception for very short extracts, and it also accepted HowardsHome's reliance on the quotation right for press reviews and on the text and data mining exception. That court ordered the publishers to pay HowardsHome's legal costs.

The Court of Appeal has now taken the opposite view. According to statements from both publishers, it found that HowardsHome could not rely on any statutory exception, including the one for text and data mining, and needed the publishers' permission to use their content.

Why Short Extracts Still Count

A central question was whether short excerpts can infringe. HowardsHome argued that using brief fragments of articles was allowed.

The appeals court rejected that argument, the publishers said. Precisely because money was being earned from those extracts, their use amounted to an infringement. The court also recognised that licensing income is an essential part of publishers' business models, alongside subscriptions and advertising.

HowardsHome was held liable for the publishers' damages and was ordered, under penalty payments, to disclose its unlawful use of online news content. It must also pay the legal costs.

Wider Significance for AI

HowardsHome stopped operating in 2024, shortly before the District Court ruling, so the judgment will not change an active business. Its importance lies in the reasoning.

In their announcements, the publishers said the decision is relevant to other companies, including AI developers, that claim the right to scrape and use news content on similar grounds. The text and data mining exception has been widely cited by technology firms across Europe, and courts are still working out its limits.

Under EU law, that exception lets anyone with lawful access to a work analyse it automatically unless the rights holder has reserved those rights in an appropriate, machine readable way. The District Court had found that the publishers had not shown such a reservation covering HowardsHome. How courts treat these reservations is likely to be central in future disputes involving AI training.

The ruling is a decision of a national appeals court and is based on the facts of this case. Even so, it adds to a growing body of European case law on how copyright applies when automated systems collect and reuse journalism for commercial gain.

It remains to be seen whether the case goes further. Under Dutch procedure, an appeal judgment can in principle be challenged before the Supreme Court of the Netherlands on points of law, and no such step has been reported so far.

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