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Lawsuit Stops Headline Scraping

Posted by kdawson on from the ok-geez-so-i'll-stpop-sending-you-traffic dept.

Stephen Larson alerts us to the out-of-court settlement of Gatehouse v NY Times, a lawsuit that attempted to stop the Boston Globe from linking to headlines and excerpting initial sentences from a competitor's Web site. At issue was the Globe's practice — barely distinguishable from those of Google News, Yahoo, and others — of linking to another news source's coverage of local news. The upshot is that the Boston Globe will stop the linking. No judicial precedent was set, because the case was settled before reaching a judge.

2 of 85 comments (clear)

  1. This is ridiculous by biscuitlover · · Score: 5, Informative

    FTA, it sounds like Gatehouse see this as a copyright violation but, as several other posters have pointed out, the same thing goes on on news aggregator sites all the time. In fact most stories on Slashdot contain snippets from other sites. It's an unavoidable and very useful facet of the web

    This is yet another example of 'old' media not really understanding online practices. Most sites benefit tremendously from others linking to them - look at what happens with Slashdot. That is, unless the 'benefit' is so great that their server turns to dust.

  2. Re:Web fundamental by dattaway · · Score: 4, Informative

    I would give almost anything to have a blacklist of domains I could set while logged into google so that those never showed up in my searches ever again...

    Exactly what you are looking for, Google's customizable search engine:

    http://www.google.com/coop/cse/