Gatehouse vs. NYT Link Lawsuit - Creative Commons involved....
When I posted the article about the GateHouse vs. New York Times lawsuit and put out the thought argument that this lawsuit is really about copyright then constricting linking and that it would be a good thing for Creative Commons if GateHouse won - even so that most bloggers out there seem to disagree with that idea - I have been digging up some more dirt about the lawsuit and looked at the content of GateHouse that they want to protect
The surprise was apparent when I opened the site and has put me all the more in favor of a GateHouse win - they publish all their content under a Creative Commons Non Commercial Attribution License.
So the lawsuit - and that has not been made clear by big media - is about exact the same issue that not even 4 month ago I said needs solving in court at one point - namely that if you deep link to someone content - like make an embed of a video - or in the case of the lawsuit post and excerpt of the text with a headline - which is under a non commercial license and you have advertisement on your blog/newspaper aggregator site (like the new york times) you are violating copyright law. This lawsuit - if won by GateHouse - would dramatically shift the web into a commercial free zone as people who still want to have traffic either have to do it totally non profit and link only to creative common content that is under a NCA license promting in turn to basically force everyone to just publish NCA content or become totally unlinked and therefore unloved. That would be a huge boon to creative commons - it would also clear the original issue of embeds being links or not because either way CC license would have to be adhered to.
What it also means is that each and any site making money by just aggregating links and content without creating their own content and actually needing the money to operate is likely doomed - no loss here. There would still be the same content its just that you might have to actually go to the person who created it. Not a bad thing for those that create content rather then just spread it - or those endeavors would be purely driven by enthusiasts (not making money) and they would only link to NC licensed content - not to bad for Creative Commons and other free licenses.
John Duncan said in a comment on the Buzzmachine:
Fair use was not designed to allow companies to build businesses around copyrighted content by taking the most interesting stuff for free and then selling advertising next to it, even if that content does generate some traffic for the content originator itself. It was designed to allow content owners to reproduce small parts of each others’ work to avoid permission requests for everything.
The whole lawsuit court documents can be found here.