If the headline is not copyable, how would I cite an article in a newspaper? "The second article down in the left-hand column of the front page of The Sun on 2010/11/27?"

Copyright prevents copying the expression of ideas. If an idea is expressible in only one or a few ways, copyright is not appropriate.

The smaller the expression, the fewer ways exist to express the idea.

Where do you draw the line between a "creative" headline, and a headline that just expresses the idea as concisely as possible?

Surely some individual phrases in the article require "a lot of time and creative work" - can those not be quoted elsewhere?

The US Copyright office has this one correct:

"Several categories of material are generally not eligible for federal copyright protection. These include among others: ... Titles, names, short phrases, and slogans; ..."

http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ01.pdf

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There is no line that defines what's copyrightable and what's not. That's why we have courts to decide the borderline stuff.

The 80:20 ratio of software development applies to the legal system as well. Tightly specifying the legal code for the borderline 20% would require so much work and added complexity to be almost impossible. Hence we instead use the court system to decide on the borderline cases.

Generally a wide range of factors are taken into account when quoting a work. This includes the length of the quotation (in proportion to the whole work) and the context the quotation is used in.

So for example short poems (<10 words) have received protection in the past, because the 10 word quotation forms a substantial proportion of the work.

The argument for protecting headlines comes down to whether headlines are works in their own right. Given that they can stand on their own independent of the articles they're associated with means that the probably do qualify to be treated as works on their own right.

The creativity and originality criteria are tricky, it's likely that some headlines are copyrightable but others aren't. Only a court judgement can clearly but a headline in one category or other.

But as I said elsewhere, this is only relevant if you are copying from another source. If you write a headline that happens to be identical to another headline then that isn't a copyright violation (regardless of length).

> certainly newspaper editors put a lot of time and creative work into headline writing

But that is not the basis of copyright. The purpose (mechanism-wise) of copyright is this: keep prices high enough to allow producers to cover costs.

Would increased copying of headlines drive down the price of the product being sold? That does not seem sensible. In fact, it seems more likely that the opposite would happen. So how is copyright monopoly justified here? -- it does not appear to be.

> the aggregators don't have any inherent right to make money off other people's content

Yes, actually, they have exactly that, as we all do. Benefit is not a zero-sum game. Copyright removes that natural freedom only for particular circumstances, and only because it is thought pragmatically useful to do so.

> In my personal opinion it's perfectly reasonable for a news website to ask people not to reproduce their headlines (or link to their stories).

Asking people not to link to your stories is absurd on its face when you put your material on the Internet.

You could say exactly the same thing about hot-linking images. Or asking people not to share your telephone number.

Ignoring the legal issues, if someone asks you not to link to their website then the polite thing to do is not to link to it.

Of course there might be some cases where you might be justified in liking against the owner's wishes (for example criticism, review, etc.) - however if your just linking because it adds value to your own site, then frankly that's just being a jerk.

>You could say exactly the same thing about hot-linking images.

No, these are fundamentally different issues. Hotlinking an image causes the image itself to show up in the context of your content. Linking—not hotlinking—to the image is no different from linking to a story or any other piece of content available on the WWW.

If you don't want the rest of the Internet to be able to access your resource, don't give it a uniform resource locator. If you must, simply implement rights management. You are free to tell people not to link to your content, but they are free not to care, or even to be aware of your wishes.

I'm not saying newspapers should be granted any specific protection beyond other websites. I think any website should be allowed to ask someone not to link to them.

The URL protocol allows hotlinking just as much as it allows normal linking. What the protocol does and doesn't allow doesn't define the ethics or the situation.

I'm sure all the companies that want to control inbound links would love to have an inbound link based rights management system. However sites they want to block just use various redirect tricks to cover up the referer.

Providing a link to a website about X is the ethical equivalent of telling your friend where they can learn about X.

You missed the critical conditional of "when the owner's asked you not to do it".

A closer comparison might be passing information onto a friend, when the person who told you the information in the first place asked you not to pass it on.

No, I said what I meant. The ethics of the situation may indeed be driven by the conditionals, but the isomorphism is valid across all conditionals that you might apply. Thus, you can imagine some situations in which linking (or telling a friend) is unethical, just as you can imagine others in which it's not.

You can't even compare it to hotlinking, a suitable equivalent of hotlinking is hosting the content from the other website from your website. The web is built on linking if you don't want other people to link to your website you can add redirects and denies based on where people are coming from and see how long your site lasts.

Is your objection technical rather than philosophical then ? - you don't object to controlling who links to your site (or at least ability to view) but rather to the control being human driven rather than automated (via robots.txt, refers, or a similar method) ?

Sure, the web is open you can choose to run your website the way you want it, if you don't want people linking to your content you should stop them. But the burden should be placed on the website owner and not those who are linking to the content, this isn't something like stealing content that we are talking about (which should be despised) it is simply sharing content with others no different than telling someone to check out a book named Fill in the blank.

Robots.txt is great for something that is automated like scraping but otherwise it is severely limited.

As somebody in the newspaper business, I think it's very unreasonable. Editors also put a lot of effort into choosing good font faces, weights and sizes, but you're insane if you think you own the copyright on mixing 11.3 pt Minion Pro-Demi with 12 pt Balboa-Bold. The fact of the matter is, it may in fact be an excellent and highly creative look, but it's still unreasonable to copyright something that simple.

Headlines are even worse, because they're the piece's name. If headlines fall under copyright, it becomes potentially illegal to talk about a news article. That makes copyrighting a standard font library look downright logical.

Citation for the purpose of discussing the piece is likely to fall under the protection of fair use/fair dealing exceptions under copyright law.

If describing the destination of a link is a potential violation, I would be very nervous about anything qualifying as fair use — as I said, any use I can think of for a headline should either qualify as fair (if it's for the purpose of identifying the article) or be almost impossible to establish as an intentional infringement in most cases due to the fact that it's five-ish tightly constrained words.