Forum Moderators: not2easy
Here's the thing: I guess with popularity, comes more visitors. And with more visitors, comes people who might think it's okay to just do cut and paste of your reviews. This has happened a number of times. As a movie site, I don't mind people linking to me at all -- actually, it's a great thing. They'll link to the site, or a specific reviwe, and it draws traffic to my site.
But one site simply did a cut and paste of a review of a movie and pasted it on their own site. Sure, they mentioned where the review came from, but I was a bit stunned by this. Normally I don't mind people using a line here or two, but it's always in the service of linking to the full review. Now this person has pasted my entire review! Sure, I get credit for writing the review, but I want people to read it at MY site, not HIS.
And when I asked him to remove it, he did, but not before he mentioned this was "perfectly legal" under the "fair use doctrine". Now, as I said, my site started out as a hobby, but I get a bit ticked off by people who steals my intellectual property and claim it's perfectly legal.
IS IT?
Copying the whole review is not really acceptable and they were chancing their luck, I'd guess.
There have been several discussions in this forum on this point of "fair use" and here are a couple
[webmasterworld.com...]
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If your material is good you will encourage more use of it elsewhere. Look at it another way as a means to promote your site.
Why not consider creating a site policy to cover use of material and encourage proper (acceptable) use allowing a certain level of copying and acceptable credits?
Credits such as: "Read the full review at example.com"
A copy is just that - a copy. A quote is something else.
So, NO it's not legal to rip off a full page and use it - it doesn't even have to be legal by default to use a small quote, but it may be considered "fair use" anyway. And depending on your country, some extra issues may be there as well. Here (Denmark, Europe), as an example, even deep linking to newspaper articles like what Google News does, is illegal, so the law works in mysterious ways sometimes.
Then again, some countries, if the offender lives there, really don't care about such issues.
As you obviously offer some valuable content, i'd advice you to set up a page with "quotation guidelines" and explain explicitly how many characters that may be quoted at any time, say 500 or so. Plus, require that a link is put next to the quote (a deep link would be okay - in my opinion better than one to your index page). That way you can get extra marketing and incoming links as well for your site, that might not be a bad idea.
/claus
Rather cheeky of this one to claim that posting your entire review is "fair use"...
As engine notes, perhaps you can turn it to your advantage by permitting use of portions of your copy if appropriately credited and linked.
Now, in order to stop this, I've put a small message on every single one of my pages that tells them the review is not to be reprinted anywhere without permission. Before, I just had a simple copyright notice. Silly me. :)
P.S. And thank you for the welcome. This forum is INVALUABLE! I can't believe all the things I've learned just after a week of trolling!
Yes, he did do that! That was EXACTLY the tone of his email reply, along the line of... "Well, even though it's LEGAL for me to do it, since you ASKED I will... blah blah blah". It was exatly just like that! The nerve of some people. Sheesh!
I would change your copyright statement to inlcude somehting along the lines of: (C) Copyright 2003. Publication of this article in part or whole is only permitted with a letter of approval from the author.
Yep, I've done something similar to that, albeit reluctantly. I just always assumed that a (c) and copyright notice was enough, and that people would use common sense in these matters. Oh well. Live and learn.
Something along the lines of, "This film, by director Some Guy (Film 1, Film 2)..."
Where Film 1 adn 2 are links to other films by that director.
My theory is that if someone is too lazy to write their own content, they will avoid your review and nick someone elses! ;) Make them work for it! :)
Not a sure way of protecting your content, but all the articles Ive had nicked havent had internal links in the text.
Scott
(and welcome to WW BTW! :))
