GateHouse picked the right time to file a lawsuit against the New York Times Company. My blog was down, so I couldn’t comment.
Here’s the story in a nutshell: GateHouse runs local Websites out in Massachusetts called “Wicked Local.” In fact, GateHouse has a history of putting a lot of emphasis on the Web, and they’ve been pretty successful out there. Well, the Boston Globe — owned by the New York Times Company — has launched some competition, a site called “Newton.”
The site includes links to articles from GateHouse newspapers, as well as a paragraph from the articles in question.
In other words, The NYT is doing to GateHouse what I do the Journal Star (owned by GateHouse). I link to articles and include one or two (maybe three or four) paragraphs. Here’s the difference: I’m not competing with the Journal Star. And I generally offer some commentary of my own.
The online world has responded mostly negatively to the suit. David Carr of Seeking Alpha practically accused GateHouse of being a bunch of Luddites:
I am not making this up. If this sounds like a court case that might have occurred in the early 1990s, when sites of all kinds were just getting used to the Intarwebs, that’s because it is virtually a carbon copy of some of those early cases. The argument in a nutshell is that GateHouse is mad because the Times (or rather, the Boston Globe, which is owned by the same company) is “scraping” its headlines and the first paragraph of stories, and then “deep-linking” to the stories themselves, thereby copying the site’s content and stealing its traffic (as Mike Masnick at TechDirt points out, GateHouse is also apparently suing for breach of contract, because its articles are Creative Commons-licensed, but with a non-commercial license).
Jeff Javis was especially harsh:
The more I think about it, the angrier I get at Gatehouse for its dangerous and hypocritical crusade against links.
Links are the bloodstream of the web, carrying its oxygen. Links are how original journalism will get audience, traffic, branding, attention, credit, and monetization. Links are a gift and a courtesy. Links are the means to better-informed communities. Links tie people together with each other and the information they need. Links are necessary. Links are good.
And:
So what should happen here? Should Gannett sue Gatehouse? Should we all just sue each other for linking to each other – for doing what the web is all about?
Look, GateHouse certainly isn’t a very sympathetic character. But I think Jarvis is refusing to see both sides in this.
But I found one blogger, j-blogger Noah Bombard, who sees where GateHouse is coming from:
The GateHouse suit addresses not so much the linking to their content, but what in some cases appears to be the almost exclusive use of its content to populate a site the Globe is theoretically making money on. Without GateHouse content, the site would be much more sparsely-populated. GateHouse alleges they’re doing all the work by reporting on local issues and news while The Globe is doing little more than putting up their own site and taking GateHouse content.
Well, when I visited Newton today, I saw only two links from any Wicked Local site, so it wouldn’t be all THAT scarcely populated. Still, there is something uncouth about a news organization with the resources of the New York Times Company creating a ad-laden portal page that’s based almost entirely made up of content from other news sites and blogs. I don’t think Newton is anything like a search-oriented news aggregation site like Google News, and it sure isn’t some blog using “fair use” to comment on the local media.
In other words, I don’t blame GateHouse for being mad as Hell.
