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NY Times Sued Over Linking Practice
Last weekend the big topic around these parts was how much content scraping is too much? Our house band even created a music video to explain the scrape and why it’s all about links and cash. I am all for excerpting when needed while using as little as possible with links to the story source. I will have more on this topic over the next week or so – trying to work through some ideas and concepts.
Elinor Mills at CNET has the lead on a story today out of Massachusetts. Apparently a Massachusetts-based newspaper has had enough and has decided to sue the parent of boston.com, The New York Times Company. Elinor notes, "The links, as seen on Boston.com’s Newton site for instance, lead to the original articles on the GateHouse-owned sites, which display advertising. However the lawsuit claims GateHouse is losing advertising revenue as a result of the linking because readers don’t see the ads on the GateHouse site’s home page."
The newspaper publisher also says the links confuse readers. NY Times spokesperson says this is a common practice used across the Web. I believe this topic will only become hotter as we enter 2009. While it seems that the NY Times may not have been scraping, there’s no doubt that there is big money in scraping.
Update: Duncan Riley has a good look at the case discussed here. He believes it’s more about competition than about the actual linking.
Here’s the full complaint document for download.
“But never using content from another site as the only content in a post.”
Is that even a sentence? It’s painful to have to read stuff like that 2 or 3 times to figure out what the author is trying to say. Videos are fun, but if they come at the expense of some basic proofing and editing, then something’s wrong. Don’t worry about anyone scraping this post.
does this guy have a chance at beating the ny times?
Beating? No. But getting sued is bad PR and the media loves it, so there’s always a likely possibility that they’ll settle.
This is silly
From what I understand of this, they are complaining about a deep link.
Links to the original source are much more important than a home page link, because it allows search engines to determine the original source, though that can take a bit of time, and is far from perfect.
A credit link just to a home page is bad both from a user and SEO perspective
A deep link a reader wil follow to get more about the story, and in most cases can then be guided to more relevant content, which the NYTimes or affiliate sites don’t provide.
Newspapers have been scraping data,links and stealing keywords for years.