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Saturday, January 24, 2009

Lawsuit to Determine Fair Use for Blog Links, Headlines

By Susie Madrak
Friday Jan 23, 2009 6:00pm

This could affect the blogosphere as we know it, most specifically news aggregators:

A copyright and trademark infringement lawsuit filed last month against The New York Times Co., owner of The Boston Globe and its Boston.com website, is being watched closely by news organizations, Internet researchers, independent bloggers, and companies that aggregate news online by linking to a variety of news sites.

At the heart of the complaint, lodged by GateHouse Media Inc., which publishes 125 community newspapers in Massachusetts, is the question of whether Internet news providers will be able to continue the practice of posting headlines and lead sentences from stories they link to on other sites.The case has been scheduled for trial in US District Court in Boston as early as Monday.

"This is the first case where these intellectual property issues have come to a head," said David Ardia, director of the Citizen Media Law Project at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society in Cambridge. "If the judge was to rule for GateHouse on every point, it would have far-reaching implications for the news and information ecosystem that underlies the Web as we know it."

Kelly McBride, ethics group leader at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Fla., a school for professional journalists, said the case could result in new guidelines for how much, if any, content from one website can be used by another. "This is standard procedure across the Internet now," she said. "Newsrooms adopted the procedure from other practitioners."

posted by progress at 4:01 AM

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If my research is correct, news stories are not covered under Fair Usage laws anyway. Unless of course the copyright has expired on the piece in question...... Fair Use covers media which was purchased, or used for educational purposes (such as sampling music for a school presentation. It also covers making backups of digital media you have purchased, although the DMCA has killed even that. (Under the DCMA, if you bypass copyright encryption on media you purchased, you've still broken the law.)......... I'll have to keep an eye on this story to see how it plays out. If the court rules in favor of the defendant, it could mean a whole lot for the internet. Of course, the opposite is also true. Should the court rule for the plaintiff, even posting the headlines here on U4Prez will become a copyright violation without the owner's expressed (in writing) permission.


posted by Icababe on 01/24/2009 @ 4:10 PM