On December 22 2008 GateHouse Media sued the New York Times alleging that the "hyper-local" news aggregation pages on the New York Times-owned site Boston.com infringed its copyright and trademark rights. At the judge's order the case proceeded on an extraordinarily expedited basis with a bench trial set to begin on January 26 2009. On the day prior to the start of trial the parties settled.

The NYT agreed to remove all links created using GateHouse RSS feeds and to refrain from using such feeds to create links to GateHouse content so long as GateHouse implemented commercially reasonable technological measures intended to prevent use such use.

The NYT did not agree to cease linking to GateHouse stories by other means (e.g. by typing in link text manually).