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International Law

: Freedom to Differ

Lose-lose: The New York Times and GateHouse Media settle their dispute over linking

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The New York Times Company and GateHouse Media have settled the copyright infringement suit Gatehouse Media filed last month:

GateHouse had accused The Boston Globe and its website, Boston.com, both of which are owned by The New York Times, of violating copyright law by posting material without permission from WickedLocal.com, a GateHouse website covering small towns in Massachusetts.

GateHouse, which is based in Fairport, New York and operates hundreds of daily newspapers and local websites, was objecting to the publication on Boston.com of headlines and lead paragraphs of stories from WickedLocal.com.

The case was being closely watched by many in the media industry because of potential legal implications for the common practice of linking between news sites and the use of links to content on other sites by news aggregators.

The New York Times had argued after the lawsuit was filed last month that linking to other websites is widespread and that Boston.com provided a link back to the original stories on WickedLocal.com.

A trial had been scheduled to begin in a US District Court in Boston on Monday but an agreement was reached over the weekend.

Under the terms of the settlement, neither party admitted any wrongdoing and in the absence of a court ruling, the case failed to bring any legal clarity to the situation.

Under the settlement, GateHouse agreed to put in place technical safeguards that would prevent Boston.com from automatically "scraping" material from GateHouse sites and Boston.com agreed not to try to circumvent the barriers.

Boston.com would also discontinue its use of RSS feeds from GateHouse sites and take "reasonable commercial steps" to remove headlines and lead paragraphs of GateHouse stories from Boston.com by March 1.

But the agreement did allow both websites to continue providing links to one another -- so long as they did not do so through RSS feeds or "scraping."

Read more here (from Google News). Download a copy of the settlement here. Techdirt's Mike Masnick sums up why this settlement isn't good news for anyone:

It's bad for the NY Times, because in settling they've almost guaranteed that plenty of other companies will now come seeking similar "settlements." It's bad for GateHouse Media because in winning "the battle" they're losing the war. The NY Times/Boston Globe will no longer be sending them the traffic they were getting in the past. It's hard to describe the level of pure cluelessness that goes into actively turning away the kind of traffic a major media publication can provide. It's bad for readers of both sites, because it limits the usefulness of the content they get. And... most importantly, it's bad for everyone in failing to have a hard and fast precedent set that linking to such sites and including the headline and a snippet are clearly fair use. What a shame.