Because of the nature of this forum, people are often quoting information that appears on other sites - especially news sites. This is fine, but we need to be vigilant about not violating copyrights.
Overview
One thing that you should remember about copyright is that it exists to protect authors and to encourage the creation and dissemination of works.
Works that do not have any copyright usually state so. However, you should never assume that a work is in the public domain just because it does not carry such a statement. Unless you see something to the contrary, you should assume that anything you find is subject to copyright protection, even if it does not have a copyright notice on it.
The law awards copyright to original works as soon as they are created. This includes any text, music and other sound files, and photographs and all other graphics. Their creators do not lose copyright protection just because they put them on the Internet.
Bear in mind, too, that under current United States law a copyright remains in effect for the author's lifetime plus 70 years.
The basic rule is that you may not quote anything or reproduce any image unless you have the copyright owner's explicit permission. The owner is usually the author unless otherwise indicated. If your post includes a quote or reproduction, we request that you include a statement to the effect that you have such permission. Example: (Reprinted with author's permission.)
Some Web sites include a statement granting blanket permission for reproducing all of some of its contents under certain conditions. We suggest copying that statement into your post along with whatever material you quote from the site.
These sites provide additional information for those interested:
What Is Copyright Protection?
10 Big Myths about copyright explained
When U.S. Works Pass into the Public Domain
A brief intro to copyright
Fair use exceptions:
In general, under the "fair use" doctrine, you may post excerpts or partial quotes from a work, with attribution, for purposes such as commentary or to illustrate a point. Do not present it as if it were your own work. We request that in addition to identifying the author, you also include a link or reference to the source.
Unfortunately, there are no objective and easy standards about what is and is not fair use, and the issue has been clouded even more by threats of litigation from news organizations claiming that even very short excerpts from articles on their Web sites infringe on their copyrights.
Everything is a judgment call, and there has been some confusion about how exactly we make those judgments. We want you to be able to quote from other sites and we want you to be able to feel confident that what you quote will be OK and that you won't be asked later to edit it. Following are a couple of principles to keep in mind.
1. Quantity: To put it simply, the more of the original you quote, the more likely you will be to violate copyright. The less you can quote while making your point, the better, so when in doubt, try to copy less and rewrite more. For any particular post, the more that you write that is your own original commentary on the article or issue, the more you can legally quote from the works of others but only up to a point. In general, copying more than half of an article is considered infringement.
2. Quality: The simplest way to put this is, if what you quote (even if small in quantity) conveys so much relevant information that there is no need for anyone to go and read the original work, then you have probably copied too much of the wrong parts. This should guide you especially if you wish to quote from news articles. Reporters commonly include the most important information in the first couple of paragraphs (the "lead") and those are just the portions one is most likely to want to copy and that also, unfortunately, tend to be most difficult to rewrite. On the other hand, you can often find something interesting and quote-worthy farther down. The test is whether your quotation is likely to make someone want to read the entire article. If it does, you're probably OK. If it doesn't, you might have a problem.
In short, in most cases you're best off sticking to a couple of short paragraphs (depending upon the length of the original and excepting the first couple of paragraphs of a news story), rewriting anything else, and including a link to the original.
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