When publisher Gatehouse Media accused the New York Times Co. of copyright infringement in a widely-watched Internet publishing case in December, some observers feared the worst: “The future of online journalism may depend on the outcome,” wrote columnist and journalism professor Dan Kennedy.

As it turned out, the case resulted in a settlement that - while requiring the Times to change its practices — did not set any clear legal precedents. And while the outcome may influence future disputes, the debate about what constitutes “fair use” on the web remains unresolved.

The background: Last fall, the Times’ Boston Globe launched “Your Town” Web sites covering three Boston suburbs, the first in a series of more than 100 “hyperlocal” sites the Globe said it plans. GateHouse, publisher of 400 daily and weekly newspapers, complained that the Globe’s sites were reprinting headlines and lead paragraphs (ledes) verbatim from its own “Wicked Local” websites.

The settlement, announced January 26, prohibits the Globe from “scraping” the headlines and ledes from Gatehouse articles via RSS feeds or other automation. But it allows Globe staffers to write summaries of the Wicked Local content and post links to the original articles.

“To put it in the language of online-journalism theory, they have to shift a bit from raw aggregation to something closer to curation,” wrote Joshua Benton, director of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University.

At the heart of the dispute is the “fair use” provision, which allows one to quote excerpts of another’s work without permission or payment. Section 107 of the Copyright Act lists four factors for determining what constitutes “fair use.”

1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;

2. the nature of the copyrighted work;

3. the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and

4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

Gatehouse alleged that the Globe sites did not clear these hurdles because the hyperlinks sent readers directly to “Wicked Local” stories, bypassing the ads on its home pages and creating confusion on the source of the original reporting. And because online readers only scan the headlines and ledes of many articles, the practice deprived Gatehouse of any benefit from its reporting on that content, Gatehouse complained.

“The issue here is whether the unauthorized borrowing deprives the original author of some substantial income stream or opportunity,” wrote UCLA law professor Douglas Gary Litchtman in a report filed in support of the Gatehouse suit. The Globe’s sites “target the same audiences, and the same advertisers, for the same purpose of furnishing news and information for and about a specific local community, each and every day.”

According to Gatehouse’s complaint, the Globe was scraping 10 to 30 headlines per day from its sites. A February 14 search of the Globe’s Your Town site for Needham, Mass. found no Gatehouse links on the home page. But Gatehouse content represented 8 of 16 headlines on the schools page and 14 of 24 headlines on the sports page. (The Globe has until March 1 to remove the copied links from their website archives.)

Although the Gatehouse settlement created no legal precedent, David Ardia, director of Citizen Media Law Project, told Nieman the case could have “persuasive power” — used by news organizations for guidance in future disputes and by judges looking for evidence of  “common practice.”

The Gatehouse case was the latest legal skirmish over web sites linking to other publisher’s content. Google has been paying the Associated Press for use of its content since 2006 and it settled a similar dispute with news wire Agence France-Presse in 2007.

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A promise Philly fans probably won’t keep

God bless Charlie Manuel for winning the world championship with my beloved Phillies. But he was not the most articulate manager in the World Series. That would be the Tampa Bay Rays’ Joe Maddon. Even though his young team - the worst in baseball a year ago — didn’t win the Series, Maddon said their experience would change them forever: “The mind, once stretched, never returns to its original shape” (my paraphrase of his paraphrase of a quote attributed to Oliver Wendell Holmes).

That’s been a philosophy I’ve been pursuing at the TreeHouse Media Project. I don’t expect myself or anyone visiting this site to necessarily become an expert in video, audio, podcasting, website design or search engine optimization. But once you’ve learned some of the basic skills they remain forever part of your multimedia toolkit, even if you turn to experts to execute them for you.

It was in that spirit that we launched My1stTime, a guide to the presidential race for first-time voters. Our hope was that by incorporating some fun features - pictures and video of the celebrities supporting McCain and Obama; Facebook applications such as Sarah Palin, Guardian of the Northern Frontier - we would lure young voters into reading comparisons of the candidates’ positions on energy and health care.

In the process, we hoped to learn something about shooting, editing and posting videos and promoting our content through social networking sites. On the first point the project was an unqualified success, though the videos I shot won’t win any Emmys - not even those crappy local ones.  It was my first experience using Macintosh’s iMovie, the easy-to-learn video-editing program.

We learned that you can shoot decent-looking video interviews with a simple consumer camera under the right conditions. We also learned the shortfalls of these cameras: because they have no inputs for microphones you are limited to the audio picked up by the on-camera mic. That means you will hear lots of background noise, such as the concert and speakers that threaten to drown out the subjects I interviewed at an Obama voter registration rally headlined by Bruce Springsteen.

We also learned how to use a terrific free tool called TubeMogul, which allows you to upload a video to more than a dozen video-hosting sites at once and provides statistics on viewership. We also learned that while there are many competitors out there, YouTube still generates most of the traffic - three-quarters of our nearly 500 views to date were on that channel. We also learned that if someone you don’t know says they want to “friend” you, it’s probably a porn site. (Strangely, most of the viewers on YouTube were 34-54, not the teens and 20s featured in the videos. And 70% were men. Are these just a bunch of horny middle age guys with nothing better to do than look at college coeds?)

We also learned some of the fine points of WordPress. We started with a 3-column German Newspaper template (a “Theme” in WordPress parlance) and modified it by changing typefaces and some of the layout.

On the second point, using social networking sites to publicize our content, we were decidedly less successful. First I was booted from Facebook for using a fake name, Barack McCain, for a profile I hoped to use to drive traffic to the site. Second, we didn’t launch the website until Oct. 24 - less than two weeks before the election and not enough time to build much of an audience. And by the time we did launch, I was  so exhausted from a series of 18-hour production days that I had little time or energy to promote it.

But I’m happy to have done it.

So, what are you doing to stretch your mind?

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