Content_ed - 12:27 am on Nov 24, 2011 (gmt 0)

What happens when someone extensively quotes another online publication

Well, one of the things that happen is that the online publication worries that they've been Pandalized because of copyright infringements and spends a month filing DMCA complaints in WT dashboard.

I'm not going to go deep into fair use here, I'll just say that if you aren't getting permission first, "extensive" quotation will always be seen as a copyright infringement by the law unless it's true editorial use, ie, you're breaking it down line by line for expert critique or ridicule.

In the past couple days, I've had to deal with multiple instances of schools gathering my work into PDFs for course materials and then letting it get online, with sites built from nothing but spreading sections of my pages around a template, and TWO clowns who published eBooks with pages from my website, and were selling them through Amazon and Google Books.

If you're in the journalism business, you've probably had training or trained yourself on fair use. If you're not in the journalism business, don't copy from other people's websites and you won't have to worry about it.

As to duplicate content being an onsite or offsite issue, as you can guess from my little rant above, we have no duplicate content onsite, so if it's been the cause of our Panda penalty, it's from offsite. And we did see an uptick with the Panda update a few days ago, which may just be the result of cleaning up a chunk of the infringements.