GateHouse Media Strikes Again: Claims Headlines, Ledes Are Covered By Copyright, Threatens Forum

from the they-never-learn dept

Remember GateHouse Media? The regional news company sued the NY Times for linking to it, claiming it was copyright infringement to include the headline and a brief snippet along with the link (you know, like Google...). Amusingly, it turned out that GateHouse Media was doing the same thing. Eventually the two companies settled, and apparently that's convinced GateHouse Media that complaining about such links is a good idea.

Via CitMediaLaw we found out that GateHouse Media has sent a cease & desist letter to an online forum, claiming not just that its stories are covered by copyright, but that its headlines and ledes.

We wish to advise you that the stories, headlines and/or ledes that you are copying are the copyrighted property of GateHouse Media... and that your copying constitutes infringement of GateHouse's rights under U.S. Copyright law. This infringement is not excused by links to the original stories or by indicating the name of the publication in which the content originated.

Of course, it's not clear that copyright law actually agrees with that. And, even if GateHouse is correct, this makes no sense whatsoever. It's not as if people reading the Masscops forums are doing so as a substitute for some GateHouse Media news sites. If anything, Masscops is sending traffic to them, and helping new readers discover GateHouse's sites. What sort of company turns down links and traffic? Not one that's long for this world...

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UK Newspapers Threatening Aggregator: Like Donkeys Suing The Inventor Of The Wheel

from the how-nice-of-them dept

Mathew Ingram points us to the news that some UK newspapers are apparently threatening UK-based news aggregator NewsNow. I've used NewsNow in the past, and I can't see what the complaint is -- at all. NewsNow provides headlines and links. That's it. At least when I was using it, it didn't even provide summary text. I actually discovered a lot of useful new sources when I used it, and that's because NewsNow always struck me as one of the best aggregators out there. It found a lot more than most of the others. To be honest, my big complaint with NewsNow is that they limit their free feeds significantly -- and there's no RSS or anything. After a while, I just gave up on using it, because without RSS, it just didn't fit into my daily method of following the news, no matter how useful the site is. However, it's really difficult to see what sort of complaint any newspaper could have with such a service whose sole purpose is to drive more traffic. It is, as the link above so colorfully describes:

the equivalent of a herd of donkeys filing a class action suit against the inventor of the wheel....

Unless there's something more to these legal threats -- and, admittedly, only one side is weighing in on what happened here, the whole thing just seems like a stretch by at least some UK newspapers to try to intimidate online sites into paying them.

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Fun With Headlines: Is Social Networking Good Or Bad For Friendship?

from the how-about-neither... dept

Headline writers for the press are always trying to generate some attention, but it's amusing when they present a headline that seems to go entirely against what's said in the actual article. Professor Nancy Baym, who has been studying the power of online communities, discovered this when her latest research was released. Marketwatch ran a press release about her research declaring: Social networking, not for real friends, which certainly seems attention grabbing, if it were not for the fact that her research doesn't say that at all. What the research actually notes is that you may have weak relationships focused on a narrow topic, with folks you connect with on various social networks -- but it also notes how that's a good thing. She doesn't say that social networks aren't for real friends, even if that's what the headline reads.

Amusingly, another article covering the exact same bit of research runs with a different headline: Facebook friend collectors 'are normal' -- (suggesting the opposite of the Marketwatch headline) and quoting Baym:

"You can ask somebody, 'Of your 300 Facebook friends how many are actually friends?' and people will say, 'Oh, 30 or 40 or 50.' But what having a lot of weak-tie relationships is giving you access to are a lot of resources that you wouldn't otherwise have.... They can really open up access to resources that we wouldn't have otherwise."

That doesn't sound like "social networking isn't for real friends" at all. But, apparently, accuracy doesn't make for as good a headline sometimes. Then we've got USA Today, which seems to totally contradict the Marketwatch headline, by noting: For teens, a friend online is usually a friend offline, too. Apparently, the people at Marketwatch and at USA Today seemed to think they were reading different studies.

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Lots Of Parents Playing Video Games With Kids... Though, That's Not What The Headlines Say

from the details,-people,-details dept

In the last few years, we've seen a number of studies suggesting that, while most people think of video games as something kids play, that it's increasingly becoming a family activity involving parents (and even grandparents) playing video games with their kids. This seemed like a good thing. A common activity over which families can bond seems positive. That's why it was a bit surprising to see a bunch of headlines trumpeting the news that "Many Parents Avoid Video Games With Kids." So when you get down into the article, you see that the headline is seriously misleading. What the report actually says is 43% of parents with kids who play video games never play with them. That would mean that 57% do play video games with their kids, which seems like quite a large number, especially compared to earlier reports. Yet, that apparently doesn't support the story line that the headline writer wanted to tell. While it is true that another 30% say they spend less than an hour a week playing video games with kids, that is still some bonding time, and shows that many, many parents are quite aware of what kinds of video games their kids are playing -- meaning that perhaps politicians can stop claiming they need to act as parents when it comes to video games.

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