The Lessigian vision of software code implementing policy is more closely realized by ACAP. From the Implementation Guide: “ACAP makes it possible to communicate to a crawler that it may only crawl content for certain specified usage purposes only.” I haven’t read the details of ACAP, but as it was written in the last few years I believe it addresses syndication.

Lessig fans should promote ACAP, because it’s a standard that the little guy could use to specify his own rights.

There’s also an HCI component as well. Boston.com could, as good faith, put an icon next to each post indicating its provenance: either Boston.com, WickedLocal, or the local citizen-contributor bloggus bloviatus fignewtonus. This would demonstrate how much content is coming from each source. (Claim 109, for those of you scoring at home.)

I’m interest in the discovery phase here. The presumption that many of the blog evangelists have been making is that links to a content site are always economically beneficial and never deterimental. Time to see some real numbers on that…

Still, I’m a glutton for abuse so I’ll give it a shot:

I’ve followed Gatehouse and its progeny since the days of Cap Cities, Fidelity and CNC. I dislike most everything they’ve done. Nearly all their papers were better before they started squeezing them to pay for debt load.

I say all that that because I’m strongly rooting for Gatehouse here. There’s a larger issue at play that affects the entire industry. This isn’t about linking. It’s about information. Information isn’t free.

Boston.com isn’t simply linking to stories from other websites. They are scraping the lead graphs of all the articles. That’s a clear distinction inho and one that is not being discerned in much of this discussion.

Many of the folks who read the Newton site are never going to click thru to Wicker Local and thus no benefit accrues to Gatehouse for their reporters efforts. Somebody still has to pay that reporter’s salary, benefits, etc. It’s not going to be Boston.com.

There are plenty of reasons the newspaper industry is imploding, and yes many of the wounds are self-inflicted, but giving away content for others to profit from is not a business model that can succeed. In the end it will hurt everyone because there will fewer reporters out their gathering the news.

If Boston.com prevails and Gatehouse goes under (a real possibility with their stock at .04 cents) do you think the world will be a better place? Will Boston.com really cover Newton more? We all know the answer to that.

I hope the newspaper industry learns from the book publishing world. They struck a lucrative deal with Google to share revenues for their content. A similar battle is brewing over videos with Viacom and Google. When newspaper decide to stand up and stop giving away their product we might finally turn a corner. This lawsuit is one small step.

Thanks for reading. Commence bomb-tossing now.

Moreover, your assertion that “Boston.com should take the hint and stop pointing to GateHouse” because GateHouse attempted technical anti-copying measures, is inimical to a robust fair use doctrine. If the use is fair, one shouldn’t hesitate to continue the use, even in the face of objections from the copyright owners. Copyright owners too frequently object to fair uses of their works, and the doctrine would lose much of its force were fair users to “take the hint and stop” whenever copyright owners attempted through technical means to bar such uses.