The New York Times Company is being suited for copyright infringement over its Boston Globe local sites linking with headlines and ledes to another publisher’s articles. GateHouse Media, which publishes 125 community papers in Massachusetts, filed suit in U.S. District Court there Monday. The company claims that the Globe sites lifted headlines and ledes word-for-word and therefore infringed its copyright, even though the items were credited to and linked back to the Gatehouse pubs, according to Boston.com, which is owned by NYTCo (NYSE: NYT).

—No link love lost: In the complaint, Gatehouse says it wants NYTCo to shutter Your Town Newton, one of Boston.com’s new local sites, reports GateHouse’s Newton TAB. GateHouse says that Boston.com’s month-old Newton site used content belonging to The TAB’s online counterpart—called WickedLocalNewton.com—and its sister pubs. Specifically, GateHouse charges that Boston.com both through advertising and its direct aggregation is confusing readers about where the articles actually originated. And even though Boston.com does link back to GateHouse sites, the publisher is frustrated that the links do an end-run around the ads on its homepage. In addition to Your Town Newton, Boston.com launched two other hyperlocal outlets last week for the towns Needham and Waltham. Back in May, Boston.com created BoMoms, a social net and local guide aimed at young mothers. Boston.com execs have planned to roll out about 100 other hyperlocal sites.

—Aggravation over aggregation: It’s been a while since sites threatened legal action related to aggregated content. The GateHouse-NYTCo suit comes a few days after Huffington Post’s Chicago-based site was called on the carpet of using parts of Chicago Reader’s concert reviews without permission. Also, the suit is being brought at a time when local and regional papers are feeling crushed by the economy and the general state of the newspaper business. NYTCo rep Catherine Mathis tells Boston.com that the its hyperlocal sites aren’t doing anything different from what blogs have been doing all along. Mathis: “Far from being illegal or improper, this practice of linking to sites is common and is familiar to anyone who has searched the Web.”