Newspaper chain sues over links to stories

A newspaper chain is accusing The New York Times Co. of improperly including links to its stories on the Boston Globe's new local Web sites.

Boston.com said Tuesday that The New York Times Co. violated copyrights on the stories by pasting verbatim headlines and first sentences from GateHouse papers on the Globe sites.

The Boston Globe is owned by The New York Times Company. GateHouse owns 125 smaller Massachusetts papers.

The suit filed in federal court Monday raises questions about the widespread practice of posting links to news stories by media sites and bloggers.

The Times Co. said the practice was a simple aggregation of the news that was beneficial to all media sites. GateHouse, however, said The New York Times Company actually took steps to circumvent the computer barriers it set up to foil the use of its articles.