Question for those who have blogged awhile and linked to mainstream news: how many times have you noticed the links have been changed? I’ve noticed that in some news publications they don’t seem to understand the concept of a permanent link, and instead intentionally choose dynamic links for their content. This is the perfect defense, BTW, against people that deeplink your content. Are these dynamic links intentional?

Yesterday I was tied up in the office most the day but still able to catch several stories regarding some newspapers grousing over Google News and related sites scraping their headlines and (thumbnail) pictures without permission, pondering whether this was Fair Use or not and wanting to challenge this legally.

“They’re building a new medium on the backs of our industry, without paying for any of the content,” Ali Rahnema, managing director of the association, told Reuters in an interview. “The news aggregators are taking headlines, photos, sometimes the first three lines of an article — it’s for the courts to decide whether that’s a copyright violation or not.”

The newspapers that are upset don’t need to go to court to break the current system, they just need to continue to alter the links to their source stories after a certain period of time like some of them have been doing. Most bloggers, myself included, don’t go back to the archive links very often and update prior linked stories. In fact, a good WP plugin would be something which caches pages linked to and looks for material changes after a period of time and then automatically delinks the piece in the article with a note that the source was changed by the publisher.

Last year I wrote about when third party links are changed and broken, specifically fingering a few publications clearly guilty of changing their links.

Admittedly, this practice by some publications has altered my linking in posts strategy. I’m much more likely to link to a publication, blogger or content which has true permalink structure rather than ones who have good content but will intentionally alter their source after a certain period of time or other factor.

Dan Gillmor wonders if this is biting the hand that feeds and the answer is of course, yes. It’s already working with me but I’m just one miniscule section of the internet. One of the fastest ways to guarantee that I don’t read your publication or link to it is to change the link to the source after some period of time. This is considered very anti-webmaster behavior. In some niche online businesses (link lists, for example) this can get all of your sites blacklisted. It’s a form of redirection and it’s bad netiquette.

Readers that find stories I’ve linked to here in the archives that have changed, please use the comments and tell me about it. I try not to link to sources that do this. If other bloggers and publications like Google unite and treat source material the same way, it will send a clear message to publishers that permalinks are internet-friendly and dynamic links are counter productive.

Nathan hits the proverbial nail with:

I don’t understand the fighting of Google News. It sends traffic, produces zero content, sells zero ads, and helps small and large publishers alike. Taking yourself out of the search engines is always a way to shoot yourself in the foot … and there are plenty of websites doing far worse content theft. Besides, if the Google cache is fair use, how could Google News not be?

There’s little doubt courts will rule what Google News and others are doing is absolutely Fair Use and the whining, crying bitches from this global news assocation will either need to exercise more dynamic linking practices — and hose their own sites’ usefulness. Good riddance, because search engines will have a hard time following this activity, much less people. If they had one foot in the grave, after increasing dynamic linking practices, soon they’ll have two.
Joseph Weisenthal agrees with Michael Parekh that this is “SIMPLY A NEGOTIATING TACTIC.” I don’t know Parekh that well, but I think one of his buddies needs to send him a new keyboard or suggest decaf; that caps key seems to be stuck.

Seriously, I see Parekh’s point, but again, they don’t need to go to court, they need to just keep disrupting the links. Change the links, break the flow. Broken links break the system and over time you can break enough links so that nobody with any significant amount of traffic will want to link to your site. If these newspapers don’t like the traffic they get from these sources there are numerous ways to stop this from happening, both technical and non-technical — like just asking them to stop, for instance. I’m pretty sure if Google was told to stop indexing they would stop. Robots.txt anyone?

Bottom line is these disenchanted newspapers should learn to adapt, establish their presence online and fine creative ways to monetize their content. I’m not calling for their heads, but the RIAA-type tactics just piss off and alienate people, some of which might be their very paid customers. Not too business savvy.

• Experiment reveals how fast Google News links breaking news
• The downside of embedding video posts from third parties using third party hosting
• You aren’t what you link, at least not in 2006
• When complaining about internal links don’t forget Wikipedia
• Fark a sellout, Pluck a hypocrite and deeplinking responsibility?
• Stepping up forced registration for online news