A colleague, Bob Courchaine of Northfield Internetworking, sent me an E-Commerce Times article titled Bloggers Cautioned About Being Copy Cats. It’s an important issue to understand. I’ll take a stab at it, but this is a layman’s interpretation of the rules. I’ve not consulted a copyright attorney on this.
“… bloggers, many or most of them amateurs, often overdose on cut-and-paste editing, which can result in copyright violations… the courts ask four questions to determine if someone is making fair use of copyrighted material:
- What is the nature or purpose of the use?…
- What is the nature of the work being copied?…
- How much of the work was copied?…
- How did the copying affect the market for the copyrighted work?…”
Is the above fair use? I think so:
- I’ve used an ellipsis (three periods in a row) to indicate that there was more text to the sentence or paragraph that I’ve used.
- I’ve used only a small amount of text.
- I’ve indented the text I copied/pasted from the article (using the Blockquote tag) to make it clear that the words are not mine
- I’m using the content for additional commentary
- It’s unlikely that my doing this negatively affects the revenue for the website.
