Sued for Linking? Why Newspapers are Dying
Occasionally over the years, we have had customers ask us if they need to get permission to link to another website. My usual response is that I haven’t seen anyone turn down a link. As long as you aren’t reprinting copyrighted information, you don’t really have anything to worry about. Well, it turns out that statement may not be entirely true. Not if you’re linking to a web property owned by a dying newspapers company that totally missed the boat on how the Internet works.
GateHouse Media Inc., which owns 125 Massachusetts newspapers and several web properties, sued the New York Times Co. saying its Boston.com-run website “Your Town Newton” was posting headlines and small article snippets from WickedLocal.com. Generally, it is considered acceptable to print a title and a synopsis as long as you’re linking back to the original source for the full article. This type of content aggregation is becoming increasingly popular online. GateHouse Media’s complaint was based on the fact that users don’t see the source of those articles and may not realize they’re coming from WickedLocal.com. While this may be true, I think GateHouse Media failed to realize that many users may never have seen or read their articles if not for this syndication. GateHouse Media likely benefited much more from the linking than they lost. Hoarding content was a fantastic strategy in the Newspaper era but if you want to survive in a new media society you have to participate, share content, and generate traffic. If the New York Times or Boston.com wanted to link to my content I would be more than happy to provide them with full access to whatever they needed to make that happen.
The settlement the two parties reached in this suit basically said the New York Times will remove the links from their Boston.com site and will not repurpose content from GateHouse Media. Congratulations tools, you lost by winning.
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Comments
They didn’t miss the boat on how the Internet works, they completely misunderstood how copyright works, and a little facet of that called fair use. In fact, I can’t believe that the suit was settled; the New York Times should have told GateHouse Media to get bent.
Time and again, dumb website owners post draconian linking policies that defeat a huge part of what makes the Web so great. As you pointed out, these policies probably cause the sites more harm than good.
Personally, I like BoingBoing’s linking policy:
No site with a linking policy (other than a policy such as this one, created to deride and undermine the idea of linking policies) may link to Boing Boing. Ever.
@ JackInTheBox
You might not want links from pages which google considers harmful or spam related. Bad neighbourhood can affect your ranking.
Cheers
P
Why would you ever not want a link. This is the dumbest thing I have ever seen. I hate internet n00bs.