Oh, yeah, if I'm not allowed to link I sure as hell won't be PURCHASING and READING the damn thing anymore (I've noticed a lot fewer posts and a lot less time on their websites when I fail to purchase a morning paper).
Related: The Globe Says I Can Link Them
"Lawsuit over website links in spotlight; Copyright violation or fair use to be decided" by Robert Weisman, Globe Staff | January 23, 2009
A copyright and trademark infringement lawsuit filed last month against The New York Times Co., owner of The Boston Globe and its Boston.com website, is being watched closely by news organizations, Internet researchers, independent bloggers, and companies that aggregate news online by linking to a variety of news sites.
At the heart of the complaint, lodged by GateHouse Media Inc., which publishes 125 community newspapers in Massachusetts, is the question of whether Internet news providers will be able to continue the practice of posting headlines and lead sentences from stories they link to on other sites. The case has been scheduled for trial in US District Court in Boston as early as Monday.
"This is the first case where these intellectual property issues have come to a head," said David Ardia, director of the Citizen Media Law Project at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society in Cambridge. "If the judge was to rule for GateHouse on every point, it would have far-reaching implications for the news and information ecosystem that underlies the Web as we know it."
Kelly McBride, ethics group leader at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Fla., a school for professional journalists, said the case could result in new guidelines for how much, if any, content from one website can be used by another. "This is standard procedure across the Internet now," she said. "Newsrooms adopted the procedure from other practitioners."
How IRONIC that I am on the side of the MSM in this one and that THEY developed the procedure form US, 'eh? I'm opposed because it could apply to all internet sources of news rather than just their crap (although one wonders why a blog would want to stop others from linking their work).
GateHouse, a national chain of local daily and weekly newspapers based in Fairport, N.Y., filed its suit Dec. 22, alleging that Times Co. violated copyright law by using "verbatim" headlines and snippets from GateHouse stories on Boston.com. The Globe's website in November launched a local news site covering Newton, the first of a series of "hyper-local" Your Town sites planned for the Boston area. The sites, which now include Needham and Waltham, compete with GateHouse's own stable of "Wicked Local" community sites.
In addition to copyright violation, the complaint charged that Boston.com was infringing on GateHouse's trademark rights by posting online attributions to GateHouse brands such as Newton Tab, Daily News Tribune, and Wicked Local, "thereby causing confusion and mistake among users of the infringing website as to the source and endorsement of the content posted there."
A response filed Jan. 14 by Times Co. listed a string of counterclaims and noted that GateHouse's websites similarly have used and linked to content from the Globe, The New York Times, and other news sites. "If GateHouse's claims against New York Times have any merit, then its own conduct constitutes copyright and trademark infringement and unfair competition," the filing said. Neither Times Co. nor GateHouse executives would discuss the case....
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The GateHouse-Times Co. case is being tracked by many Internet bloggers, who often link to news stories as a jumping-off point for their postings....
Hal Abelson, professor of computer science and engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said "techies' ground rules" are that Internet linking should be as open and widespread as possible. He acknowledged, however, "lawyers' ground rules" might be more likely to impose restrictions.....
Well, FUCK THAT and FUCK THEM!
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