There has been a lot of discussion of headlines and copyright this past week on Copyfight. See, Copyrighting Headlines and Bloggers, Copying Newspaper Headlines and Copyrighting Newspaper Headlines?. Now, we hear from the horse's mouth what a major wire service (Reuters) thinks of the idea:
Infringements of our copyright does not include where bloggers quote from and link back to our original story, or where sites display a headline and link back to reuters.com. We are very comfortable with these practices.
via PaidContent.org and Tech Law Advisor
Category: IP Use
The Reuter's position begs the question of whether their headlines actually enjoy any copyright protection to infringe upon. (Put another way, it's very gracious to permit things you can't really prevent.)
Regarding the larger question of whether news headlines in general even qualify for copyright protection (thus setting the stage for fair use arguments), I think it may be useful to differentiate between headlines pertaining to true news stories (covering some event), from those that relate to analysis, opinion and features.
True news stories are almost always factual. Any creative headline expression is usually centered on compressing the factual situation - but the essence is still factual. The creative content of such headlines is probably not enough to distinguish them from headlines of competing publishers regarding stories on the same event. Thus, they would appear outside of the realm of copyright protections.
When you move away from what I call "true news" reports, the creative component is often somewhat greater. Perhaps, for argument's sake, it even reaches the point of being copyrightable. In such a case, it's quite unclear (to me, at least) whether copyright protection would apply to a set of headlines (which is the typical form in which headlines are used), some of which are completely factual and others of a more expressive nature.