AP’s Quest to Outlaw Search Engine Links – What Will This Mean For Legal Marketers?
The Associate Press (AP) launched an industry initiative to protect their content from online misappropriation, stating “We can no longer stand by and watch others walk off with our work under misguided legal theories”, said AP Chairman, Dean Singleton.
Their focus is on bigger mainstream blogs, internet publications and believe it or not search engines such as Google, rather than span blogs or sites that quote their paragraphs without attribution or link.
I got wind of this story via an article written by Rich Ord, on WebProNews.
Mr. Ord, the founder of NewsLinx.com made “Re-Link-News” himself in 1996, when he was contacted by numerous news organizations including the NY Times, Wall Street Journal and Time Magazine, for “Deep Linking” . He responded by stating that NewsLinx was essentially no different than a search engine and therefore had the right to publish headlines and link directly to web articles.
In order to avoid what sounded like legal threats, Rich offered to stop including their headlines at their request. The typical response in 1996 was that they did not want NewxLinx to stop publishing their headlines.
In January 0f 2009 Gatehouse Media , which operates more than 375 newspapers, filed a lawsuit against the NY Times
GateHouse Media v. New York Times Company
Among GateHouse’s numerous claims, that the NY Times’ use of the headlines from and links to – GateHouse content from their online entity, Boston.com’s “Your Town” site, constitute copyright and trademark infringement. The case was dismissed due to settlement.
11-years-later, copyright and trademark infringement issues regarding social media are still a hot issue. Since legal marketers are actively linking to each other’s content, I look forward to hearing our legal experts’ thoughts on this issue for sure!
See Other related articles:
Copyright And Libel In the Twitterverse – A Question for Copyright Legal Pros
Social Media Used as The Ultimate PR Tool For Your Law Firm
Legal Firms Don’t Have To Run Into Trouble Using Social Media
Photo by Lisa Kimberly
