Is automated headline-linking to blogs content stealing?

On Friday evening, Marcel from jobblog.ch made a little post to check, who's stealing his content. I actually saw that post on Planet Blogug and didn't think much of it, but when a few hours later local.ch appeared as “content-stealer” I was quite surprised…

What have “we” done? On the so called city pages, local.ch gets the latest post from bloggers of that city from Planet Blogug and displays them with the title and a direct link back to the original post (see for example here).

I of course quickly removed jobblog.ch from the local.ch index, made a comment on jobblog.ch and all was fine again, also for Marcel (later Dorian made also a statement)

But the general question remains (independent of the jobblog.ch case). Is taking the headlines of a site, putting them on your own site with a direct link back to the original post already a copyright infringement? Isn't that just what Google, Technorati et al. also do? What would NZZ or the Tagi say, if I'd do that? (I'm btw not talking about the actual content of the post, but just the headline).

There are some legal cases on that question, the Shetland News vs. Shetland Times case and especially for Switzerland the federal court case 4C.336/2004 where it was about spidering classified pages (real estate in that case), which it said, that this is allowed. With all that in mind, I highly doubt that one would win in a court with such a case.

But the problem in the jobblog case is also, that local.ch takes the “latest posts from a city” from blogug.ch, where one can add his blog. And if one adds it there, it doesn't of course imply that everyone else can use that feed (legal issues aside). To give some options, list.blogug.ch has two checkboxes: “Non-commercial sites may use this feed” and “Commercial sites may use this feed” to declare what one wants. IMHO this classification is somehow too broad. I for example don't mind if the headlines of my blogs appear on commercial sites (as long as they directly link back to me), but if they would also take the content, I'd maybe have a problem with it. So, maybe blogug should add an option “Linking just the headline to the original post is always fine” (or similar). But then again, only a little percentage actually does claim their entry at list.blogug.ch and maintain it, so at it the end, it's useless nevertheless (except blogug doesn't check any boxes by default, so that it's really clear)

The other solution for providers like local.ch would be to ask each and every blog owner, if they're fine with being on local.ch. As the whole thing is an automated process, this would imply a pretty big administrative overhead.

Anyway, local.ch and blogug are thinking about better solutions for all of this, until then, if you're not happy with your headlines being included on local.ch, just leave us a note and we will remove your blog.

There's also an older post to a similar topic by me (but that was about the actual content, not just the headlines)