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A New York based publisher of local newspapers in Massachusetts, GateHouse Media, has sued The New York Times over the linking practice of Boston.com. The publisher has accused NY Times for allowing its Boston Globe unit to copy the exact headlines and initial sentences from articles published on it sites.

According to New York Times’ senior vice president of corporate communications, Catherine Mathis:

Boston.com’s local pages, like hundreds of other news sites, aggregate headlines and snippets of relevant stories published on the Web. They link back to the originating site where the interested user can read the entire article.

Far from being illegal or improper, this practice of linking to sites is common and is familiar to anyone who has searched the Web. It is fair and benefits both Web users and the originating site.