Be carful what you cut and paste

[jnrdesertrats]

Be careful what you cut and paste

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We all do it. You see an article that relates to a discussion so you copy and paste it into a post. It appears that newspapers are going to crack down on the use of their copyrighted material.

Make sure you give credit or at least cite your source.

Steve Gibson has a plan to save the media world’s financial crisis — and it’s not the iPad.

Borrowing a page from patent trolls, the CEO of fledgling Las Vegas-based Righthaven has begun buying out the copyrights to newspaper content for the sole purpose of suing blogs and websites that re-post those articles without permission. And he says he’s making money.

“We believe it’s the best solution out there,” Gibson says. “Media companies’ assets are very much their copyrights. These companies need to understand and appreciate that those assets have value more than merely the present advertising revenues.” ...

...Gibson’s vision is to monetize news content on the backend, by scouring the internet for infringing copies of his client’s articles, then suing and relying on the harsh penalties in the Copyright Act — up to $150,000 for a single infringement — to compel quick settlements. Since Righthaven’s formation in March, the company has filed at least 80 federal lawsuits against website operators and individual bloggers who’ve re-posted articles from the Las Vegas Review-Journal, his first client.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/201...g-for-dollars/

Newspaper Chain’s New Business Plan: Copyright Suits | Threat Level | Wired.com

[DunerDan]

If you post the URL, who cares? It takes you to thier site anyway...

[Noozeyeguy]

It's called "fair use," and it's been a principle of copyright law for centuries. There's a good primer on Wikipedia.

Bottom line, it's probably best practice to c&p a relevant paragraph (with attribution) and link to the entire article....