New York Times sued over Boston.com's linking practice
A publisher of mostly small, local newspapers has sued the New York Times Co. over its aggregation of news headlines on Boston.com, challenging the practice many sites use of linking to other sources.
In its lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Massachusetts on Monday, Fairport, N.Y.-based GateHouse Media, which publishes more than 100 papers in Massachusetts, accuses the Times of violating copyright by allowing its Boston Globe online unit to copy verbatim the headlines and first sentences from articles published on sites owned by GateHouse, including the Newton Tab.
The links, as seen on Boston.com's Newton site for instance, lead to the original articles on the GateHouse-owned sites, which display advertising. However the lawsuit claims GateHouse is losing advertising revenue as a result of the linking because readers don't see the ads on the GateHouse site's home page.
The linking also confuses readers, leading them to believe that GateHouse endorses the linking practice, according to the lawsuit.
Catherine Mathis, senior vice president of corporate communications at the New York Times, said the linking practice is commonly used around the Web and that GateHouse's claims are without merit.
"Boston.com's local pages, like hundreds of other news sites, aggregate headlines and snippets of relevant stories published on the Web. They link back to the originating site where the interested user can read the entire article," she wrote in a statement.
"Far from being illegal or improper, this practice of linking to sites is common and is familiar to anyone who has searched the Web," Mathis wrote. "It is fair and benefits both Web users and the originating site."
In an e-mail sent to GateHouse staff, an executive said GateHouse had taken the legal action after being unable to resolve the matter informally.
"GateHouse has taken this step to enforce its rights under the law and protect the integrity of its trademarks and original news content, in furtherance of its ability to provide hyper-local news coverage to its newspaper readers and website viewers in the communities throughout the greater Boston region which it has served over many years," wrote Kirk Davis, president of GateHouse Media New England. "As a matter of policy, I won't be commenting further on this matter. Instead, it is appropriate that we let this matter take its natural legal course."
Google got heat a few years ago for its Google News aggregation of headlines and summaries and settled a copyright lawsuit with Agence France-Presse last year. Google also is paying the Associated Press to use its content on Google News.
Meanwhile, a weekly publication in Chicago, The Chicago Reader, has pointed the finger at The Huffington Post for re-posting an entire concert preview.
In an e-mail sent to CNET News on Tuesday, Chicago Reader Web Editor Whet Moser wrote that the Huffington Post had printed multiple concert previews "in full from multiple publications over the course of a couple months."
Huffington Post co-founder Jonah Peretti defended the site's aggregation practice to Wired News and said the complete article re-printing was a mistake.
Elinor Mills covers Internet security and privacy. She joined CNET News in 2005 after working as a foreign correspondent for Reuters in Portugal and writing for The Industry Standard, the IDG News Service, and the Associated Press. E-mail Elinor. 
Morons.
Customers never like clicking on a link for "breaking news: plane explodes over..." and they get the newspaper's home page and have to search for the article (which, incidentally, is under a different title).
Yeah, that will mean they lost business due to their greed, as people will roll their eyes and move to the next article or the next site that has a direct link.
As the manager of The Orange Beach Community Website (http://www.OrangeBeach.ws), I welcome any websites that want to link to our articles. I attribute much of our success to-date to these types of links.
There has got to be more to this story... it just doesn't add up.
1) GateHouse is losing revenue since the Boston.com links point directly to the news item and not to the main site. If the link was to the main site (and hence GateHouse could get the Ad revenue) it would be fine.
2) Boston.com is in a sense misappropriating or giving the Boston.com readers a sense that it is Boston.com that discovered/posted/hosted the news item when in fact it is GateHouse
3) Boston.com is getting revenue from users visiting their web-site (but reading GateHouse articles)
So I don't see why it is incorrect for GateHouse to sue them. They had tried settling it informally. No wonder Google lost the case against the French Press Agency. You just can't make money off of someone else's property and not compensate them.
What a load of bull. If you only make money if someone visits your front page, your site deserves to die. If the link was to the main site? I DON'T WANT A LINK TO THE DAMN MAIN SITE. I WANT A DAMN LINK TO THE CONTENT I WAS INTERESTED IN.
One must be a moron NOT to want traffic from other sites.
"Boston.com is getting revenue from users visiting their web-site"
And the sites boston.com is sending traffic to IS MAKING MONEY BECAUSE THEY ARE GETTING THAT TRAFFIC.
"So I don't see why it is incorrect for GateHouse to sue them."
Because they don't want the web to work like the web. They don't want fair use.
On the web, you link to other sites. Fair use says that you can quote snippets.
And I've seen this issue come up before, years ago, and except for a couple of very early cases the linker wins (and those early cases were overturned). IANAL and I can't produce those cases, but I do have a functional memory.
GateHouse is in trouble, and I don't see them living very long especially after this. When small-town America has broadband access, those craptastic little town newspapers GateHouse owns will go the way of the VHS tape. http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-et-vhs-tapes22-2008dec22,0,5852342.story
(Uh oh, CNET, better watch out! I just deep-linked to a L.A. Times article... let's hope LAT isn't one of those owned by GateHouse!)
- by Internet-Lawyer August 18, 2009 8:37 AM PDT
- It's a classic fight over what constitutes news and what is copyright infringement. As an <a href="http://www.web20lawyer.com">Internet Lawyer</a> I see this issues often. There is not clear line dividing news and fair use exceptions from copyright infringement. I definitely would not want to see linking controlled but appreciate the need to secure copyrights.
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