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GateHouse and New York Times Co. Settle Lawsuit
GateHouse Media Inc. and The New York Times Co., parent company of the Boston Globe, recently disclosed a settlement following a lawsuit filed on December 22, 2008 by GateHouse in U.S. District Court. GateHouse, a website and local newspaper publisher, claimed that the Boston Globe infringed its copyright and trademark rights by posting headlines and leads from its “Wicked Local” community websites on the Boston Globe website, Boston.com. These were posted by the Boston Globe in its “Your Town” website feature, linking directly to “Wicked Local” stories on GateHouse websites. Readers using the links could bypass ads on the GateHouse homepages.
In the settlement, New York Times Co. agreed that GateHouse would set up technical barriers to prevent Boston.com from “scraping” its website content, and Boston.com agreed to comply with those barriers. The Boston Globe and Boston.com also agreed to remove previously posted GateHouse headlines and leads from the website. The agreement did not cover non-GateHouse stories to which Boston.com linked, and the Globe maintained that its use of headlines and short excerpts is fair use. Boston.com would still be able to refer to GateHouse stories, and to manually “deep link” to individual articles. Neither party admitted wrongdoing, and no damages were awarded under the settlement, with each party agreeing to cover its own legal expenses.
The case would have had far-reaching implications for online news providers and aggregation sites that post headlines and short summaries of the news stories to which they link. As matters stand, the question of how much content from one website may be used by another website without infringing intellectual property rights in the U.S. remains unanswered.
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