A lot of us have wondered why the estimable Howard Owens, who runs the digital side of GateHouse Media, has been so quiet about his company's ridiculous copyright suit against The New York Times Co. over the excerpting and linking to GateHouse stories by Boston.com's hyperlocal/local aggregation site, YourTown. Howard's once-active blog has been all but dormant lately, and his silence on the issue has been deafening–especially since he's the brains behind GateHouse's own hyperlocal/aggregation site, The Batavian.
Well, maybe we now know why Howard has been keeping quiet: He's smart enough to know that GateHouse' suit makes no sense. The Times Co., in responding to GateHouse' suit, has unearthed an internal e-mail written by Owens last fall that seems to support the exact sort of linking that GateHouse is trying to block.
In the e-mail, writing about links to GateHouse content from another site, Owens wrote:
Note that [a] headline, a few graphs and a link back to our site isn't a Creative Commons issue, but a fair use issue, and they would probably win on that one.
Compare what we do with thebatavian.com.
Ouch–if you're one of GateHouse' lawyers. Of course, Owens isn't a top officer of the company, and his e-mail could be dismissed as the personal opinion of someone without real authority to make corporate policy. But Owens is one of the top digital thinkers in the news business, so his opinion on this matter should carry a lot of weight.
Moreover, at least one other e-mail from October obtained by the Times Co. shows another GateHouse digital executive telling the operator of Famboogle, another site aggregating GateHouse content, "We have no objection to Famboogle–or any other website–posting a headline and a line or two of text from a GateHouse story, so long as it is properly credited and links back to our site for the complete story." That, of course, was exactly what Boston.com was doing.
The e-mails in the Times's legal filings seem to support the supposition that there's internal division within GateHouse–possibly between the digital folks and the more traditional print executives–over this business of linking to and from other sites on the Internets. You know, the basic building block of the Web. The GateHouse printies don't seem to understand that this evil linking actually increases their traffic (and ad revenue), rather than stealing anything from them.
I also have a feeling that GateHouse's legal action is, at its heart, an old-fashioned attempt to screw with a competitor, rather than a true attempt to establish some sort of legal precedent–though that may be an unfortunate outcome of the case. Interestingly, The New York Times Co. has countersued GateHouse, alleging that The Batavian has done the same thing with New York Times content, but that seems to be a defensive move designed to try to checkmate GateHouse.
The case goes to trial soon; it probably would be preferable for the two sides to reach a face-saving settlement that allows linking, so that Howard Owens and the rest of us can go on trying to build the future, rather than stupidly trying to defend the past.
PS: The Nieman Journalism Lab and the Citizen Media Law Project have excellent overviews of the case.
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