In a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Boston, GateHouse Media Inc. asked a judge to stop the New York Times Co. from linking to GateHouse articles on Boston.com’s new local advertising-supported “Your Town” sites, claiming its new practice of grabbing headlines from GateHouse Web sites constitutes copyright infringement. Boston.com publishes headlines, the first sentences of many stories and deep links to GateHouse Media articles. GateHouse claims its sites are losing money because people are visiting the individual story pages instead of the home pages of its sites. It wants to block the Times Co. from aggregating its content, receive compensation for losses, punitive damages and reimbursement for legal fees.
While GateHouse might have a point accusing the Times Co. of copyright infringement by reproducing sentences of their articles, some statements in the complaint about the practice of deep linking are pretty much nonsense, e.g. "The user receives no warning or notification that it has been transported to an unaffiliated third-party website, thus exacerbating the potential for confusion as to the source of origin of the repotage and information displayed on the infringing website."
In its response, the NY Times mentions
emails from GateHouse officials pointing out that identical
activities are clearly fair use. Howard Owens, GateHouse’s director
of digital publishing,
wrote (page 19):
So here is a deep link to a web site that hosts the complaint:
Deep Link to Techdirt!