GateHouse and The New York Times Co. settle dispute over Web sites

NYT, Gatehouse release settlement details January 26, 2009 11:56 AM

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.

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GateHouse and The New York Times Co. settle dispute over Web sites

By Jon Chesto/GateHouse News Service GateHouse News Service Posted Jan 26, 2009 @ 07:22 PM

BOSTON -

GateHouse Media Inc. and The New York Times Co. have settled a lawsuit that GateHouse filed last month that claimed the Times Co. was violating copyright and trademark laws by lifting numerous headlines and lead sentences off GateHouse's Web sites.

The settlement was reached over the weekend on the eve of a trial that had been scheduled to begin Monday in Boston federal court.

In the settlement, GateHouse agreed to implement software to block the Times Co., the owner of The Boston Globe, from automatically scraping GateHouse Web sites for content. The Times Co., meanwhile, agreed to honor any blocking techniques GateHouse employs.

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Reply to
Monty Solomon
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It will be interesting to see what happens to traffic on the Gatehouse site with NYT no longer linking to it.

Newspapers are, of course, complaining of others, like Google, making money off their content. But, Google and others (including Telecom Digest) only provide enough of the story for a reader to decide whether to read the whole thing, then provide a link to the story on the original site. This brings traffic to the site and viewers to the ads on the site. This should be good, but apparently web ads are bringing in less money than comparable print ads. Advertisers consider ads in print publications more valuable if the publication has paid circulation, since the subscriber is less likely to throw the publication away unread. But, does it mean the reader actually looks at the ads? The web ad has to be considered quite a bit more valuable since, in most cases, the advertiser pays only if a reader clicks on the ad. This indicates considerably more interest in the ad than can ever be demonstrated for a print ad. So, are print ads just overpriced? Or, are web ads underpriced in that they cannot pay for a reporting staff?

Back on web ads, the hit rate seems much higher on ads placed in search results than ones placed in content, since the viewer is actually looking for something similar to what the advertiser is selling. In ads in content, this is much less likely to be the case. I recall hearing of one content sensitive ad where an ad for luggage was placed alongside a newspaper story about a killer who placed body parts in suitcases.

Anyway, linking seems reasonable to me. It will be interesting to see how this all shakes out.

Harold

Reply to
harold

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