My First Warning
I have been linking to and quoting articles for four years now and got my first warning today about copyright infringement. My crime, I excerpted a half dozen paragraphs from a 15 page article in the Boston Globe on Obama's ties to corrupt Chicago slumlords with full credits, links and encouragement to go read the whole article at the Globe's site. I have no desire to get myself or Blogger in trouble so I edited the post down to make sure it fit in with the Fair Use guidelines set down under US copyright law which allows for quotation for commentary purposes. Furthermore I receive zero economc benefit from this blog, I do not have advertisement from which I receive monetary compensation. This follows in the path the AP has taken in regards to their articles and is a violation of the 1st Ammendment guarantees to free speech. I also believe this came not to protect the Globe's copyright but to repress negative commentary on their messiah, Barack Obama, since the Globe is a bastion of left wing negativism of the right. The Globe did not have the temerity to contact me so they used their surragate Google to notify me while I appreciate the heads up I did not violate fair use conditions.
I have seen several of my blogging friends reprint entire articles so let this serve as a warning to them, don't do that, it hurts us all and casts a negative light on citizen journalism.
7 comments:
You DO know that Boston is a foreign country and has been since 1858, right?
You got it right, can't hurt the messiah. I am one of those bloggers who got shut down for 5 days because I am not pro-obama even though they say it was a spam thing...I don't even link to AP anymore after what others went through. I moved to Word Press, still have my blogger blog but I removed my bar at the top. Thanks for the heads up about the Globe.
It would be interesting to discover how often this situation happens to 'liberal' blogs. Google won't release those statistics, however, 'fair use' or not.
If you link to the entire article, they can't touch you, Goat.
RWR
www.rightwingrocker.com
Goat,
Just do like the libs do. Write what you want and attribute it all to "Whitehouse sources".
Roadhouse has a point!
Well, the same thing happened to me once when I posted an entire article, even though I also linked to it and gave the author's name and full credit to her. So now I try to publish no more than three paragraphs of any article and tell the reader to go to the link if they wish to read it all.
Some people are so touchy! I would consider it an honor if someone posted an entire article of mine, just as long as they linked back to me.
By the way, if there was no copywrite posting at the bottom of the page they have no right to complain!
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