GPWA Times Magazine - Issue 14 - October 2010

1 Do not copy and republish any copy- righted content in its entirety without permission. It doesn’t matter if the whole story is three paragraphs or 30 para- graphs. Don’t do it. It is almost impos- sible to defend this as fair use and it will get you into trouble. 2 Don’t assume that providing acknowl- edgment through a link will protect you from a copyright infringement law- suit. That is a common misconception. If you want to post an entire article, you have to get permission first. Under fair use provisions in copyright law, you can use a limited amount of copyrighted material for certain purposes without permission. The next few points are to help you conform to these rules. 3 Limit the amount of quoted mate- rial you use as much as possible, and make sure you link back to the source. “The less you take, the more likely that your copying will be excused as a fair use,” says the Stanford Fair Use Web site. “However, even if you take a small por- tion of a work, your copying will not be a fair use if the portion taken is the ‘heart’ of the work. In other words, you are more likely to run into problems if you take the most memorable aspect of a work.” Three to four lines is a good general guideline. 4 Make sure you transform the nature of your quoted material. That means just don’t quote material. Transform the material by commenting on it or criticiz- ing it. Or add context to it. 5 If you are manually aggregating con- tent, then use the original article’s headline and write your own one- or two- line summary of the story, with the head- line linking back to the original source. 6 If you are programmatically aggregat- ing content, like Google News, use the original headline and the first couple of lines of the story, with the headline link- ing back to the source material. 7 If you want to discuss what someone else is reporting, just try summarizing it. Give the original source credit and link to the source material. But just “report” what they are saying by writing your own original summary. Make sure your sum- mary is brief (four or five lines) and to the point. Credit the original source within the summary. And make sure it’s a sum- mary, and that you’re not just rewriting the original content. There are other aspects to fair use, but these seven items should get you through the day. Also remember that these seven points are guidelines only. What is and isn’t fair use is a very squishy legal matter. As the Stanford University Fair Use Web site notes: “Unfortunately, the only way to get a de- finitive answer on whether a particular use is a fair use is to have it resolved in federal court. Judges use four factors in resolving fair use disputes … It’s impor- tant to understand that these factors are only guidelines and the courts are free to adapt them to particular situations on a case-by-case basis. In other words, a judge has a great deal of freedom when making a fair use determination and the outcome in any given case can be hard to predict.” For more information about fair use and copyright go to the Stanford University fair use Web site: fairuse.stanford.edu © “Do not copy and republish any copyrighted content in its entirety without permission. It doesn’t matter if the whole story is three paragraphs or 30 paragraphs. Don’t do it.” — Vin Narayanan 14 Do you copy?