- Saturday, 21 November 2009
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The INQUIRER? That's my home page... - Intel field sales engineer
New York Times nicked our content
THE New York Times has been sued by the parent company of the Boston Globe, which claims that the outfit has been using online material without permission.
GateHouse Media moaned to the US District Court that the Boston.com site violated copyright and trademark laws by "reproducing, displaying and distributing" its newspaper headlines and original material published on its "Wicked Local" web sites.
It is the classic argument that by linking to stories rather than the home page, Boston.com bypassed lucrative home page advertising. Yet since Boston.com pages contain adverts, then it was profiting from the scribblings of Globe hacks.
GateHouse says it blocked hacks from Boston.com from nicking content off its web sites, but they intentionally circumvented those measures. Probably by logging on under other addresses.
The New York Times said the case was "without merit." Boston.com aggregates loads of headlines and snippets of stories in a manner that was familiar to most readers of the World Wide Wibble.
Media watchers think that this case could decide how much content US magazines can nick from one another.µ
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p.s.
New York Times OWNS the Boston Globe and Boston.com
Hang on. Boston.com belongs to Boston Globe publishing. The article keeps on referring to boston.com as stealing stuff. How can they be stealing stuff from themselves and what would the NYT have to do with it?
Has this story suffered a major search-and-replace malfunction?
The link says it clearly:
GateHouse Media sues NY Times Co. over copyright. GateHouse Media Inc. filed a copyright infringement lawsuit Monday against the parent company of The Boston Globe.
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So yeah this was a big screwup by the inq reporter, and it shows the advantage of linking to the source.
To summarise: the NY times company owns the boston globe and they have a site boston.com and by virtue of ownership are sued by gatehouse media for what the site boston.com did in regards to copyright infringement.
Gatehouse media owns tons of small papers it seems:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GateHouse_Media
Basically the question is 'can you cut corners in a flailing industry in economic hard times and not have a million reporters saying the exact same thing when it's just for online use anyway?', and the answer is that you can report parts and condensation of other publication when you mention the source, but not whole articles and not without mentioning the source. It's been long established and is known for many many years by most everybody, this is so pointless except it keeps lawyers and judges and personal in the money I guess.
Bloody Yanks!
I mean its not easy putting an article out there and doing the footwork to make a story that people want to read or want to be informed.
So, If I take an INQ article and don't give due credit and linkage its really theft because I didn't do anything besides CTRL-C
CTRL-V.
Plagiarism is still pretty unethical any way you slice it.