The Associated Press is suing a paid news subscription company, alleging Tuesday that repackaging the wire service’s news content is a “parasitic business model.”

The suit (.pdf) blasts the Meltwater Group of San Francisco, saying the 10-year-old company’s subscription service charges a fee for “content created at the expense and through the labor of others.”

Meltwater has about 18,000 customers, who pay at least $5,000 annually for searchable content Meltwater acquires by scraping the 162,000 online news sources it monitors, the AP said. Meltwater also includes a “hot off the wire” database “to attract potential customers,” the AP said.