Lawsuit to Decide Fair Use of Links on News Sites
It’s the lawsuit for which some members of the copyright law world have been waiting: how much text in links on news sites is too much?
GateHouse Media, Inc., is suing The New York Times Co. to find out. Since many news sites, including aggregators like Yahoo! and Google News, link to news stories on other sites and include verbatim headlines and perhaps some text from the article, this case could reach fairly far and have some pretty big implications. It might even change how everyone links to copyright protected material across the Web. In the Boston Globe article linked above, Robert Weisman points out that GateHouse Media owns a number of community newspapers and sites across Massachusetts and perceives the Globe’s new community news approach as a threat to its territory. Is the lawsuit just a coincidence or something more?
The Globe article quotes Citizen Media Law Project director David Ardia, someone I’ve met through the Berkman Center. (I can’t help smiling when I read a news article and come across a Berkmanite.) He shares more thoughts and analysis about the situation via an interview on a Harvard Nieman Foundation site.
Addendum 1/28: The New York Times Company and GateHouse Media have settled. As part of their agreement, The Times can no longer scrape (use scripts to take content from) GateHouse Media’s sites.
From a Reuters blog:
“Aside from the wider (and unanswered) question of where the borderline is between polite linking and plain old stealing, it was worth getting a few laughs from watching two “old” media companies duke it out over whether links are a form of admiration or just plain theft. Maybe the real answer can be settled in an old-school-style gentleman’s agreement: You know when too much is too much.”
