It did not get to the point where Blodget was hassled over it. He used his own judgment and trimmed the excerpt down himself after using one that was five paragraphs long. "No, DJ did not contact us," Blodget tells WebProNews. "I reread the post a few minutes after posting and decided to trim it."

So there’s not exactly an issue there, but the concept remains a hot issue nonetheless. We are of course reminded of when Gatehouse Media recently filed a suit against the NYT Company itself when Boston.com published headlines and ledes from one of Gatehouse’s sites (it was ultimately settled out of court). And let’s not forget the AP’s legacy of content stinginess.

Sidenote: More on the NYT Gatehouse case in the following exclusive discussion:

Some have called the practice of quoting other sources and using said quotes on pages that contain advertisements, scraping. However, this is a far cry from what real scraper sites do in stealing entire articles, often with no credit or links to the original given.

No, Blodget and the Huffington Post (also cited in the NYT article), and many others including the NYT itself, WebProNews, and probably the majority of blogs and online publications you read all practice the quoting of other sources with links and proper attribution.

This argument is almost as old as the Web itself. iEntry CEO and WebProNews publisher Rich Ord founded the Internet’s first news aggregation site NewsLinx.com back in 1996 and recalls the same issues then as now. Rich says, "I was contacted by nearly every major news site when I launched NewsLinx including the New York Times and Wall Street Journal and was asked with an aggresive tone if I had permission to link to their stories. I always answered that I did not and that I would remove the links if they liked. They universally told me to keep linking. Even then they realized the value of the exposure outweighed their old style control over what I considered fair use of their content."

The real beef (at least currently) stems from the doom and gloom attitude about the state of the online advertising industry, and the newspaper industry itself. Publishers are afraid of losing readers (aka ad viewers) to the blogs and sites that are quoting their content.

Nevermind the fact that as Brian Stelter at the NYT notes, these blogs/sites are actually opening up the original sources to other readers who would not have gotten to the them in the first place had they not followed a link from the blog/site doing the quoting.

The "original sources" are more concerned about those readers of secondary sources that don’t click through to their sites. Another point I have often seen made in this discussion is that in the end, even the most original sources had to get their information from somewhere.

The most valuable articles are ones that bring together related points, and often these points have been made by others first. In the news industry, stories break from all kinds of different sources, and in the interest of keeping readers informed, other publications do not want to ignore the news. It seems only logical and courteous to give credit where credit is due via a quote and a link.

Blogging is not going away. In fact it will likely continue to grow. If publishers take action to eliminate the excerpting, it will likely just result in more uncredited regurgitation. A lot of trust in content will probably be lost as a result of a lack of accreditation. To me it seems this would only hurt the industry as a whole.

>>> How Much Excerpting Is Fair Use?

… discuss with other WebProNews readers below:

GateHouse Media Inc., which owns 125 Massachusetts newspapers as well as web properties like WickedLocal.com, sued the New York Times Co. because its Boston.com-run website "Your Town Newton" was posting headlines and small article snippets from WickedLocal.com.

Now the snippets linked to the original site, but that was not good enough for GateHouse. The company claimed that this created confusion over where the content originated, and leads to readers missing out on advertisements from WickedLocal’s front page.

It seemed that GateHouse was not considering the very real possibility that readers would never have made it to their site in the first place had Boston.com’s site not driven them there. Then readers would be missing out on the ads on the article pages too, and frankly, I can’t see how that would help GateHouse’s cause. Boston.com offers its parent company’s stance on the matter:

In a statement, New York Times spokeswoman Catherine Mathis said the company is simply doing what hundreds of other news sites already do — aggregate headlines and snippets of relevant stories published elsewhere on the Web — and believed GateHouse’s lawsuit was without merit.

"Far from being illegal or improper, this practice of linking to sites is common and is familiar to anyone who has searched the Web," Mathis said. "It is fair and benefits both Web users and the originating site."

It was like GateHouse was not interested in expanding its web traffic. Traffic comes from links. And many, many sites drive traffic to other sites by doing exactly what Boston.com did. They show article titles and snippets and link to the original.

Ever looked at a Google SERP? Ever shared a link on Facebook? Ever browsed tech news on Techmeme? Digg? Most publications would love to be linked to via these venues.

Since I originally posted this article, the two companies announced that they reached a settlement, the details of which can be read in their entirety here. Under the terms of the settlement, the New York Times Co. has agreed to remove all GateHouse feeds that contain headlines and ledes from Boston.com.

GateHouse will implement solutions that prevent the copying of its content from its sites and RSS feeds. "Nothing shall prevent either party from linking or deep-linking to the other party’s websites," provided that the other conditions are met. The agreement of course applies to all of GateHouse’s and the New York Times Co.’s properties.

So there you have it. It’s settled, but the topic is still up for debate is it not? Who would’ve won tihs case? Fair use still exists right? As Paid Content points out though, the New York Times Co. is in no position to deal with a lengthy and costly legal battle.

To me, it still seems like GateHouse’s loss. It should be interesting to see how much difference in traffic there is after losing the Boston.com links. Yes, they can still "link" to them, but I would imagine the rate of links will be drastically reduced. After this, I’d be surprised if they still wanted to link to them anyway.