With this link, I thee offend…

Gatehouse Media’s lawsuit against the New York Times Co.’s aggregation of ‘Wicked Local’ content on its sites could have a wicked big impact on some journalism efforts.

UPDATE: Editor’s note: Or it won’t. The two sides settled over the weekend, but didn’t let anyone know until this morning. On the plus or minus side – that pretty much kills any likelihood that we will get anything precedent setting from the case. Not sure if the fact that there were Wicked Local posts on Your Town: Newton today says anything about the deal.

For a lot of bloggers, getting your stories linked on Boston.com is a dream. Links can drive up traffic and give you exposure. But for Gatehouse Media, publishers of the “Wicked Local” network of sites, the links are unwelcome – and illegal.

Gatehouse is suing the New York Times Company, which owns the Boston Globe and Boston.com, for copyright infringement for posting excerpts and links to Wicked Local content on NYT Co’s “Your Town” sites. The sites are set up to aggregate content from Wicked Local and other publishers and blogs, as well as appropriate content from the Globe and Boston.com. That trial begins today in Federal Court in Boston.

I talked about it this morning (briefly) on NECN.

The case itself can get pretty complicated pretty quickly. But it could have a critical effect on how journalists use links in their work. David Ardia of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society has a long discussion of the case on the Nieman Journalism Lab website. Ardia’s Citizen Media Law Project at the Berkman Center also has a page dedicated to the case, which includes lots of links.

It should be a fascinating case, and hugely important to the future definition of ‘fair use’ of information online.

Meanwhile, if you were wondering what all those political fact-checking sites will do now that there are no campaigns to analyze, the folks at Politifact.com are doing a little follow up. Their “Obameter” is tracking 509 different campaign promises made by Barack Obama in the 2008 campaign, and rating him on a scale from “promises kept” to “promises broken.”

A couple of questions come to mind – is “promises broken” too harsh if there are ideas that the White House tries to push through that get blocked in Congress? There is a category calleed “stalled” that might cover Obama in that case.

And it would be interesting (although painfully time-consuming) for researchers to go back and see how other Presidents have done on the same scale? How did President Bush do in 2000 or 2004? My guess is there is a pretty wide gulf between promises made and promises kept for a number of reasons, and the scale Politifact is using might make any president look like a failure. It would be some nice context.