Lawsuit Stops Headline Scraping

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.

Comments

Conflicting interests

[anticlimate]

Deeplinking and "stealing" your stories may hurt you int the short term financially. But - let's face it - the real reason of operating a newspaper or site is to make your audience see the world through your goggles. The more your opinionated news are linked or copied in one, the more influence you have on other people's thoughts, decisions etc.
Yes I'm that cynical (in the case of the news industry at least).

Re:Conflicting interests

[gmack]

Actually deep linking helps you in the short term.

You end up with a site like boston.com sending their own customers to your site where their customers read your news articles and you get revenue because you get paid when they see your ads.

Objections to deep linking come from the flawed idea that without deep linking the customers would have come to the main page and read the ads there before going on to the page in question. I find it much more likely that they would never have known about the article at all.

Whoever filed that lawsuit needs to be fired.

Re:Conflicting interests

[Ender_Stonebender]

They won a battle. It doesn't mean that they've won the war. Especially since the settlement was out-of-court, so the legality of their action hasn't truly been tested. (There are many reasons for settling out of court - you know you can't win; you know can win but it won't be worth the price, you might win but the cost of the judgement against you plus legal fees will be higher than what the other party is willing to take in settlement, etc.)

And as other people have pointed out in this thread, there's a good chance that deeplinking actual drives increased page views by sending people directly to content they are interested in rather than relying on them to find interesting content on their own via the site's main page.

Re:Web fundamental

[h4rm0ny]

I don't know. Screen scrapers can be pretty fucking irritating. Particularly in the parallel case of support forums. It's a problem when you want to search for a problem with some code or a database and the first eight hits are all the same post on different "forums", (usually all ripped off Usenet). How do you know if the replies are the same on all threads. What if *you* want to reply? Which site do you use? And they obscure different answers just through drowning them out. Ideally, I want a Google or Yahoo search engine plugin which will let me exclude all the scrapers.

Re:Web fundamental

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree, but not everything that is annoying should be made illegal.

Re:General law about search and link services?

[NoisySplatter]

No, the fact that they settled means that the court case was likely to cost more than the settlement. They agreed to stop the linking so they lost by default in the settlement.

Re:Web fundamental

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

This isn't really about the links, though, is it? On a news site, the effort required to identify a story and get the key facts right is a large part of the value of the site. If someone else can come along and copy the headline and intro, they've got most of that same value for nothing. They are just parasites, damaging the people who are doing the real work, and not even adding any useful value for society more generally. This is why places with sensible copyright laws judge fair use by criteria other than just the size of the excerpt.