GateHouse: You’re doing it wrong
I sat down for breakfast this morning and perused the Boston Globe at my parents' house looking for an interesting story to read. I then came across an article entitled, GateHouse sues Globe's parent over web sites. GateHouse is the owner of 125 local newspapers in Massachusetts and they are suing New York Times Co., the owner of the Boston Globe, for linking to their stories without permission. The folks at GateHouse claim that the folks at the Globe's website have been copying headlines "verbatim," including the first sentence of the article. The Globe then links the headline to the GateHouse-owned site along with a notice that the story is from a GateHouse-owned newspaper.
GateHouse's main complaint seems to be that the Globe's practices make it a direct competitor for GateHouse's own web sites. Now, anyone with half a brain about technology can see the flaw in that logic. Not only is the Globe providing links to your site for free, but they're attributing all content to you as well. What GateHouse sees as a competitor is actually a free way to get more traffic to their sites; their so-called competitor is actually funneling more visitors to GateHouse's site which means they can charge more for advertising. And they want this to stop?
As further evidence that GateHouse has no idea what they're doing, they said that they setup measures to try and block screenscraping from the Boston Globe to stop the practice. They then said that this attempt failed. Apparently, GateHouse doesn't realize that they themselves provide an RSS feed with all of the information about the stories nicely formatted and that the Globe is likely using that as the source of its news.
There's so many things about this lawsuit that are stupid. First, GateHouse is a smaller company whose website gets less traffic than the Globe's website, and yet they are complaining that the Globe is linking to their stories. I could understand being upset if the Globe was hosting the stories themselves, or providing them without attribution, but it seems that the Globe has done everything correctly for the digital age. They link directly to the article on GateHouse's site and they provide direct attribution to the GateHouse site for the content. If anything, GateHouse should be thanking the Globe for the extra traffic and possibly trying to formalize the relationship in a way that could see larger traffic gains. I can think of a number of ways right off the bat: have the official Globe Newton blog come from GateHouse's Newton blog. I mean, this should be a huge win for GateHouse that they're turning into a potentially huge loss.
Let's say that GateHouse wins this case (which I'm praying it doesn't), what does that mean for the Internet? Can no one link to articles online without getting expressed, written consent from the copyright holder? And what are the damages that GateHouse can claim as a result of the Globe's actions? I can't see how they could be damaged in the least from the Globe posting links to their site. They didn't have to pay anything for that exposure and extra traffic, and they're looking to turn it off? Clearly the folks at GateHouse just don't understand how the Internet works. I just hope someone with an understanding of the Internet can talk some sense into them before they cut off their own arm.
December 23rd, 2008 - 14:20
Nicholas, these are all good points. Have you sent a mail to GateHouse with a link to this article? If not, I reckon you should!
December 23rd, 2008 - 15:34
Yet another example of old media not getting it. Such irony that GateHouse is actively trying to accelerate its declining readership in hopes of staying alive. They’ll be bankrupt in another five years like so many other newspapers.
December 23rd, 2008 - 21:07
I hope they do cut off their own arm! It would serve them right for being such ignorant idiots.
December 24th, 2008 - 00:55
@Dafydd – no I haven’t contacted them. If they’re willing to sue for someone linking to their page, I’m sure they’re willing to sue for someone telling them they’re stupid.
May 19th, 2009 - 13:56
Gatehouse won their suit (or should I say the Globe Settled).
It appears to me as though newspapers have awoken, and now want paid for their news content that they have been supplying free (for the most part) for the last 15 years. You are aware that you are not entitled to “free news” on the internet right?
Maybe it is you who does not get it?
May 19th, 2009 - 22:36
@Dave – Though I suspect your comment is intended as a, “boy, Nicholas, you’re dumb for writing this” message, I’d still like to respond to see if I can clarify the issues here.
There is a big difference between Gatehouse winning their suit in court and the Globe agreeing to settle. To me, this indicates that the already cash-strapped Globe doesn’t want to let the issue drag out and cost them more money. The details of the settlement indicate that the Globe only agreed to remove links and snippets but isn’t actually providing any damages, so this settlement was a smart financial move.
Contrary to your comment, I do not believe that we have a right to free news on the Internet. I do believe, however, that any site choosing to publish an RSS or Atom feed containing its news and updates (as I do) indicates that the site owner is consenting to distribution and viewing of that information in a forum that they do not control; that’s the only reason to provide such a feed. If you want people to view that content only on your site, then providing a feed actually defeats that purpose. Feeds can’t be consumed on their own and so must be used by some other service or site to make them usable to readers, whether that be Google Reader, another web site, or some other application that consumes feeds.
GateHouse suing the Globe would be the same as me suing Ajaxian for posting about various articles I’ve written. Such syndication only benefits the content owner, as I can attest that the more sites linking to my site directly (which the Globe was doing), the more traffic I get. Every time a post of mine is mentioned on Ajaxian, my number of users go up. This is exactly what the Globe was providing for GateHouse. The Globe wasn’t “scraping” GateHouse’s site to get its information (as GateHouse suggested), it was simply using the RSS feed that GateHouse’s site was providing. The Globe didn’t post anything outside of what was already available in that feed.
As I’ve said, there are a ton of small blogs and sites that would jump at the chance to be regularly linked to from a high-traffic web site. I’ll go on record right now and say that anyone who wants to post a headline, snippet, and link to my site with compete attribution is welcome to do so.
The Internet age, Dave, means that the rules of fair use and content distribution have changed. Providing a feed indicates that you intend to share data so that it can easily be consumed by third parties. If you don’t wish to do that, you can easily take the feed down (which GateHouse hasn’t done, by the way). I wish that this case would have gone to court so we could have had a decent debate in a public forum about this issue. I’m sure it will come up again, and I hope by that time that there are some tech-savvy people in the courtroom.