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

Re:This is ridiculous

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

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.

Which doesn't make it any less of a copyright violation. "Him too" is not a defence in law.

In fact most stories on Slashdot contain snippets from other sites.

And sometimes Slashdot does go too far, but at least it's in a grey area, with original content and editorial control as well. Presenting factual information is one thing. Mechanically cloning another's work and using their exact words, while adding no value at all of your own, is another.

It's an unavoidable and very useful facet of the web

What is, the using links part, or the mechanical copying without adding value part?

This is yet another example of 'old' media not really understanding online practices.

It sounds to me like yet another example of 'new' media thinking that by being on the Internet they are somehow exempt from the law.

Most sites benefit tremendously from others linking to them - look at what happens with Slashdot.

In this context? I'd like to see some evidence of the benefits the people doing the original work derive in this sort of case, please.

By the way, Slashdot is a particularly unfortunate example, since people not reading the original article is a running joke and "Slashdot Effect" is not a term used to describe an abundance of ad revenue giving your business a huge boost.