Slashdot Mirror
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.
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. Read more here.
"wahts woring iwth my tyoping?"
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.
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.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
I agree, but not everything that is annoying should be made illegal.
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.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.