If you’ve gone the entrepreneurial route you know that first flush of enthusiasm often dampens when nitty-gritty decisions need to be made. There’s accounting, taxes, incorporation, insurance — and that’s the clear stuff. Toss in murky issues around trademark and branding and it’s easy to see how dreams of independence get squelched.
The Citizen Media Law [...]

The Associated Press document we posted yesterday is in line with the consortium’s most bellicose rhetoric on copyright. It begins, “The evidence is everywhere: original news content is being scraped, syndicated and monetized without fair compensation to those who produce, report and verify it.”
Because we obtained the document, the AP put me on the [...]

As the dust settles on yesterday’s settlement in GateHouse Media v. The New York Times Co., I’ve spoken with a few more experts and key players in the case. (Here’s everything we’ve written so far, but if you’re new to the case, start with this post.) What follows are some unresolved questions and everyone’s best [...]

We’ve been looking at the GateHouse/New York Times Co. linking dispute quite a bit recently. (See our previous posts on the case here and here.) To recap: NYT Co.’s Boston Globe is republishing the headline and first graf of some articles and blog posts by GateHouse newspapers on a suite of new hyperlocal news sites [...]

When The Boston Globe launched a hyperlocal news site for suburban Newton in November, the paper seemed like a late adopter of an already common practice: aggregating articles, blog posts, and other content about Newton from a variety of sources across the web. No big deal.
Instead, the Globe quickly drew a lawsuit from GateHouse [...]

I wish every managing editor in the country could see this 20-minute video. I’ve heard so many misconceptions over the years about news organizations’ legal ability to police, manage, or otherwise edit the comments left on their web sites. They say “the lawyers” tell them they can’t edit out an obscenity or remove a rude [...]