Who owns this headline?

I think this is one of the more important (and least talked about) stories in online media lately.

Boston.com has created a hyperlocal site, Yourtown, for Newton MA. Yourtown is pulling in headlines from WickedLocal (owned by Gatehouse Media, which owns 125 local papers nationwide). True, Yourtown links to WickedLocal, keeping with general internet protocol. But Gatehouse has sued Boston.com – according to Peter Krasilovsky, “The suit contends that Boston.com’s deep linking directly to the article bypasses WickedLocal’s homepage, and implies an endorsement by listing the title of the local papers next to articles. Gatehouse specifically complains of “unfair competition, false advertising, trademark dilution, unfair business practices and other misconduct.”” (I don’t think it helped that, as Peter wrote, “Boston.com VP Bob Kempf, who has spearheaded the hyperlocal effort, previously served as a GateHouse executive, and is the originator of the WickedLocal site.”)

Why does this all matter? With more and more bootstrapped startups monetizing traffic through Google Adsense, it’s vitally important to figure out who owns content. And do blog post headlines constitute content in and of themselves?

Here’s an example to illustrate the point. Imagine a new startup called “TheBestOfTheRain.com” which selected the best blog posts from within the ActiveRain community every day and posted those headlines – with links to the blog posts themselves – on their site. That startup monetizes the site through advertising – Google Adsense or some other ad network. When you click on a link, a new browser tab opens to visit ActiveRain. Now extend the idea to the entire real estate blogosphere – imagine a site that pulls in the “best” posts from across the web real-time via RSS. Imagine some UGC or maybe voting or comments on the post topics. (Sounds like digg, come to think of it.) And poof: you’ve got a pretty cool website, which would attract traffic and revenue, built on the backs of the content created by thousands of other people. Does the traffic and linkjuice which this site sends to those bloggers compensate them enough? Or is this an example of a someone stealing their content for personal gain?

Take the example offline for a second – imagine if (pre-internet) someone copied headlines from hundreds of newspapers and magazines and compiled them into a weekly newsletter and sold it by subscription. Here’s a great way to receive a digest of the week’s events. Perhaps the offline example is more obviously illegit because there’s no ability to “click thru” if I’m just reading a headline on paper. But what if it’s branded and sourced to that original media outlet?

I wholeheartedly agree with Peter who wrote: “the lawsuit might bear paying attention to, with possible implications not only for the turf war in Boston, but also for place blogging in general.”