Also, I would hold off on ending the embargo until I knew exactly what was agreed upon. If NYT basically pointed out that Gatehouse was a bunch of raving loons and upon further research their legal staff agreed, this might be more of a "well...we still hate you" agreement from Gatehouse than any sort of acceptance over boston.com links to their website. Also, if NYT ended up agreeing to compensate Gatehouse for making the links or continuing to make links...I'd be disgusted enough to keep Gatehouse in the Doghouse longer still. But then again, both of those are just me. Someone needs to tell us what the agreement entails before I'm satisfied that Gatehouse learned a lesson from any of this.

Fixed

By adamg on Mon, 01/26/2009 - 10:41am.

I must've used the Firefox Save As command instead of the Acrobat one. Dumb.

Well, the copy of the order is fixed, that is. I don't know if GateHouse has been fixed :-).

Settlements need not be public

By Ron Newman on Mon, 01/26/2009 - 10:44am.

We may never find out "exactly what was agreed upon", because there is no legal requirement for either party to disclose the terms of an agreement to end a lawsuit before trial.

The dismissal "without prejudice" allows either party to reopen the lawsuit within 30 days if not satisfied, as if the dismissal had never occurred.

Yep

By Kaz on Mon, 01/26/2009 - 11:01am.

Yeah, I know about settlements. That's why it would take market/community pressure for them to release some of the grittier details (or even some rough ones, like just what did they agree upon when it comes to boston.com linking Gatehouse?). That's why I say I wouldn't link to them until they made it a little more clear what their disposition is to linking now. Just because the two of them settled doesn't mean there weren't repercussions for the rest of us in the first place. If people started to understand that you can't just go sue someone whenever you get a little bug up your ass without dealing with more than just the cost of your lawyers, then maybe there'd be more discussion and dealings without always starting off with a lawsuit. So, I say keep sticking it to Gatehouse for being dickheads for suing over someone parsing their RSS feed into a webpage until they show *us*, the readers/consumers, some contrition for them acting stupid. I don't care that they kicked the NYT in the shin until it gave them a lollipop.

Globe/GateHouse settlement details!

By Ron Newman on Mon, 01/26/2009 - 1:01pm.

Brand new Globe story, just in:

NYT, Gatehouse release settlement details

"GateHouse Media Inc. will set up technical barriers preventing Boston.com, the Boston Globe's website, from automated "scraping" of GateHouse content, and Boston.com has agreed to honor those barriers under a settlement disclosed this morning in a widely watched lawsuit filed by GateHouse against The New York Times Co., owner of the Globe and Boston.com.
...
"Boston.com will be able to refer to stories from GateHouse sites, as it has done in the past, and to manually 'deep link' to individual articles without presenting the links with headlines or lead sentences."

So the Globe wins

By adamg on Mon, 01/26/2009 - 1:07pm.

They can't use their search-engine spider to scoop up and reprocess GateHouse headlines/blurbs any more, but they can have an intern scan GateHouse RSS feeds and rewrite the stories in a sentence.

Which seems fair to me

By Ron Newman on Mon, 01/26/2009 - 1:11pm.

GateHouse to Globe: Yes you can link to our content, but you have to do some real work to get it. That work may not scale well to the 100+ hyperlocal sites that the Globe wants to create. So perhaps the Globe will have to cut back their ambitions in this area.

A natural language processor away from "Whatever, Gatehouse"

By Kaz on Mon, 01/26/2009 - 1:27pm.

One of the easiest ways I could see to handle this within the settlement would be for Boston.com to look for keywords within the headline and then add a link to their own story on that topic with a "Wicked Local has more info on this story here" link. Basically, make it a "see also" and it removes the deep link from its original headline and lead sentence. It wouldn't be hard to automagically figure out on a day-to-day basis which story at WickedLocal matches which story at Boston.com Local.

Of course, the more interesting and more sophisticated manner would be to take the RSS feed from Wicked Local and rearrange the diction (synonym usage, change voice between passive/active, etc) of the headline/lead sentence to form new material. This can also be done in an automated way although it's not as easy or clean to implement...and probably way over-engineered for the problem...but that's what makes it "geek cool".

Which would seem to allow

By ShadyMilkMan on Mon, 01/26/2009 - 1:19pm.

Which would seem to allow you to continue what you do as well, since you dont use an automatic spider system either.

It seems like a logical fair decision. One thing to remember with interns though is even if they come cheap they take up space and use resources. I always got a kick out of the non profits and other small funded entities Ive dealt with who have an every intern is welcome approach to life and then realize that they only have 2 spare computers and 5 interns waiting for a job to do... I know the Globe is much larger but if they needed an intern for every few city specific sites they had it would add up fast.

'Unrelentingly bad'

By adamg on Mon, 01/26/2009 - 4:20pm.

Matthew Ingram at the Nieman Journalism Lab calls the settlement a bad precedent:

... This kind of dual status for linking and quoting is going to be virtually impossible to defend, I would argue. What possible rationale could the NYT create for taking one approach to GateHouse content and another to content from everywhere else? The only obvious reason is that one sued the company and the others haven't. That's an invitation to further court cases.

My biggest fear (and I don't think I'm alone) is that every settlement like this one weakens the defences around the entire structure of the Web, in which linking and quoting - in some limited, representative way - is a fundamental principle. ...

Full text of NYT/GateHouse agreement!

By Ron Newman on Mon, 01/26/2009 - 1:22pm.

Here.

The agreement does restrict NYT's use of GateHouse's RSS feeds, though I'm not sure exactly how.

NYT is allowed to erect similar 'technical barriers' against GateHouse in the future, if they choose to do so.

Interesting, thanks for linking

By adamg on Mon, 01/26/2009 - 1:29pm.

So basically, Gatehouse will block requests from Globe IP addresses for its RSS files (technically, easy enough to do; it's basically adding a bunch of lines to a config file on your server) in addition to the spiders (only this time, the Globe has to obey with the blocks).

The Globe says it will continue to link to GateHouse stuff, so if it complies with the agreement, young Rodney the Intern will have to get all 1999ish and click on a series of bookmarks in his browser and then blurb any interesting stories and copy and paste the link. I'm sure the Globe will do that for awhile out of sheer spite, but eventually they're going to realize that intern's time could be better spent actually going out and writing stories (and Globe interns have proven in the past they're pretty good at covering stuff).

Isn't the Boston.com local stuff wikified?

By Kaz on Mon, 01/26/2009 - 1:35pm.

You'd be surprised how many people who really disagree with GateHouse on this one might just be spiteful enough to carry Rodney the Intern's torch for years to come.

I mean, you've seen Don in action around here when it comes to libraries and City Council, right?

Wiki just means "free labor" when it comes to a righteous cause sometimes.

Thanks for the link

By Kaz on Mon, 01/26/2009 - 1:33pm.

Some of my suggestions wouldn't probably fit the intent of this letter of agreement. But there's definitely wiggle-room in the allowance of deep-linking (so long as it's not done in a way that violates the first part about using the RSS feeds or "escaping" any technical barriers put up by GateHouse.

With the NYT not caring if GateHouse were to do the same back and its posting of the agreement letter and everything else, they really come out looking like the better man in this little dust-up. Even if Adam starts linking to WickedLocal content again, I'm not so sure how fast I'm going to be to want to click the link and give them the attention.

Here's the bottom line

By Greg Reibman on Mon, 01/26/2009 - 6:56pm.

They have agreed to remove our copied headlines and ledes from our Wicked Local sites and won't be doing so in the future. That was what we asked for when we sent a cease and desist letter on Nov. 19, 2008 and a second letter on Dec. 2 (weeks before we filed suit). That's what was agreed to today.

This lawsuit was never about linking. We love it when bloggers and others deep link to our content. We encourage our reporters to deep link to other sites. In fact, deep linking by both sides is explicitly allowed under today's agreement.

Copying content for use that is not granted by the Creative Commons license or sanctioned by the legal theory of “fair use” and linking ARE NOT THE SAME. We encourage sharing of content, and making it as widely available as possible. We plan to continue this practice.

And we are BIG Universal Hub fans. We always felt honored when Universal Hub linked to our stories and blog posts. And we'd be honored if the practice resumed.

Greg Reibman
Editor in Chief, Metro Unit
GateHouse Media New England

Put your money where your mouth is

By Kaz on Mon, 01/26/2009 - 11:34pm.

So, Mr. Reibman, when do you plan to sue Google? Or Feedage.com? Or Walpole Sports.org? Or Technorati.com?

OR...was it just that you were being pissy over the NYT's new hyperlocal sites horning in on what you think is your dominion on the internet? This was not about "fair use" misuse or licensing. The NYT is hardly the only RSS aggregator out there who links to your SYNDICATED feeds. The fact that it was on a hyperlocal website is what made you start slinging demands and lawsuits. Claiming otherwise treats us like we're a bunch of noobs, sir. Don't treat us like we just logged on this morning.

At the risk of being labeled

By ShadyMilkMan on Tue, 01/27/2009 - 9:07am.

At the risk of being labeled a Gatehouse employee again (which I am most certainly not, I dont even read their papers because they do not operate in my hometown) I do find some of the reactions by people around here to be on the border of crazy. Of course they would get more riled up over someone doing that same thing on a hyperlocal site that essentially mimics their own efforts, therefor using their own everything against them. Google/Universal Hub etc have a broad approach to life and do not threaten to leech revunue from Gatehouse in the same fashion as the hyperlocal sites. I of course do not speak for that company, and they of course have their own official reasons, but thats how I see it. I never liked it when people begin saying "how about this one, and that one and this one, you might as well not bother doing anything, just lie back and let everyone walk all over you."

Uh, exactly

By Kaz on Tue, 01/27/2009 - 9:48am.

But then don't come here and tell me that your reasons were to defend truth, justice, and American Pie! It was to defend your pseudo-monopoly on hyperlocal content in the Boston area. Is that kosher? No, that's not the way the web and world works, but at least you're not telling me it's raining...when we all know there's no such thing as yellow rain. And if it seems like I'm being a bit "crazy", maybe it's because this lawsuit had extensive reaching implications far beyond this little tug-of-war between a couple of media outlets in Boston. If this had gone any further, it would have become the latest test-bed for how "free" linking on the internet would be in the U.S. As it is, it's already now setting a bad precedence to say "well, just start a lawsuit if you want to make the other guy stop rebroadcasting/aggregating your RSS feed and we'll all just have a checklist of who we can and can't syndicate...even though they're putting it out there to be syndicated", etc.

So, yes, I'm offended the situation even arose as one where they wanted to start throwing around "fair use" as if they were wronged by the aggregation of their RSS feed. I'm then doubly offended that they would "explain" themselves in terms that obfuscate the more poignant reason of territorialism that this lawsuit was based upon considering any of the examples of RSS aggregation well within their declared lawsuit criteria.

GateHouse to employees: We won!

By adamg on Wed, 01/28/2009 - 5:25pm.

Dan Kennedy posts the memo from GateHouse Media New England president Rick Daniels to his workers on the settlement.

More nonsense

By Kaz on Wed, 01/28/2009 - 7:58pm.

But at least it was internal flag-waving. I'm still awaiting the answer to my above questions in response to Mr. Reibart. I'm not holding my breath, however.

GateHouse and Globe kiss and make up

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