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So, phew, suburban media monopoly probably won't sue me

After finally reading GateHouse's complaint and editor Greg Reibman's affidavit, I'm not worried about finding some guy at my door with a document in a blue jacket (speaking of documents, here they all are).

OK, truth be told, I wasn't really worried about that to begin with, so, yes, I was getting all drama-queenish on Monday (see Adam Reilly's take). But the GateHouse suit still bothers me.

First, a diversion on why I probably won't get sued. As I read the complain, GateHouse's main issue is that the Globe is copying its Wicked Local sites, filling it with content (as defined as a headline and the first sentence of Wicked local stories) and then trying to drive Wicked Local into the ground. I'm not doing that. I only link to specific Wicked Local stories, I don't make my posts seem like Wicked Local has approved them, I usually make up different headlines (and on those rare cases I don't, I put them in quotes) and perhaps most important, I'm not setting up a series of hyper-local sites that compete directly with Wicked Local sites. And I can sympathize with GateHouse on this point (although I'd argue that people who keep seeing "Wicked Local" on the Globe sites will realize what's going on and abandon the copycat site for the real McCoy).

And yet, the GateHouse complaint is still troubling, because of what you get when you strip away all the specific copyright and trademark issues: If GateHouse wins, it will give companies a precedent for blocking people from linking to their sites. Do that and you wind up not with a World-Wide Web, but CompuServe, circa 1995, because of the way GateHouse is claiming exclusive rights to its name. You limit online fair use, because how can you discuss something online without linking to examples of that thing? It just seems wrong for a news organization to try to do this - especially one that itself links fairly frequently to other people's posts from its own blogs (granted, in a bloggy way, not an auto-aggregation way like the Globe seems to be doing with its Your Town sites). So is there any way for a court to declare a pox on both these media outfits? As in: Hey, Globe, stop copying GateHouse, and hey, GateHouse, knock off the You Can't Talk about Us nonsense?

In the meantime, for now, I think I'll stick to not linking to GateHouse stuff out of principal. But I'll also think about it some more over the next week or so (oh it's such a terrible thing to be a milquetoast!).

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Comments

... you're doing this on principle, right (not principal)? By the way, I agree with you about declining to link from Wicked Local.

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"Hey, Globe, stop copying GateHouse, and hey, GateHouse, knock off the You Can't Talk about Us nonsense?"

Exactly.

Society doesn't need precedent either way from this particular case.

The best thing that can happen is for Boston.com to back off a bit, and spend the money they would've spent on lawyers on a journalist instead, to do the site right.

Right is fully defensible, and would be backed by a fleet of amicus briefs and the force of widespread Internet public sentiment.

IMHO, IANAL, YMMV, YMIH.

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