Forum Moderators: not2easy
If you have gray areas (content from other sites, user submitted content, etc., you may need to qualify things in more detail in your Terms of Service).
If you put some sort of threat in your notice, that threat is going out to every user of your site, even if you are not intending that it apply to your users.
Threats also tend to be viewed as a challenge by polarity responders. They will copy your stuff, just to see you try to carry through on your threat. If you just have a copyright notice and then put up contact information for how to license your content, you will have far fewer issues.
The copyright to the text on this site is held by (sitename). The fair use doctrine of U.S. copyright law permits others to quote relatively small portions of a copyrighted work for the purpose of a review or commentary. If you are interested in republishing more extensive portions of this site's content, please contact us for permission. For an excellent introduction to U.S. copyright law, visit the Stanford Copyright & Fair Use Center.
I have a link to this explanation in the footer of every page. I think the Stanford Copyright & Fair Use Center (http://fairuse.stanford.edu/) is a great in-depth layman's explanation of the ins and outs of copyright law. I provide it specifically for webmasters who may want to learn more or clear up questions they may have about the limits of fair use.
Ours currently reads, more or less, © 1997-2004 (does it make sense to date it? and is the symbol alone enough without "rights reserved? OK") Play fair. Please contact us to reprint/reuse our material (link to online form).
Nothing a lawyer would advise, but it has seemed to make people realize the material does belong to us & appeal to a sense of fairplay, pardon the pun.
Here's the APs copyright notice, I was surprised to see that the information can't be "rewritten" is that at all enforceable?
"Copyright © 2004 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. The information contained in the AP News report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press."
On the other hand, I wouldn't worry about referring to another's work--"the AP ran a story today about a clown whose nose was bitten by a snake"--unless you made it a regular habit to quote AP stories as a core part of your site content. That's the thing about fair use -- it depends a lot on context.
I mentioned the Stanford Copyright and Fair Use site above. I think a lot of people asking about copyright issues in this forum would benefit from spending an hour or so browsing the articles there. They even have an extensive section about copyright issues on the web: [fairuse.stanford.edu...]
Laura Medina, 21, of Oakland saw her former boyfriend in a car with his new friend outside a restaurant, the San Francisco Chronicle reported Thursday." The story goes on another five paragraphs...
[washingtontimes.com...]
UPI From what it looks like to me, they basically report what someone else reported, attribute it & republish it as UPI, with their own copyright...
If UPI publishes a story written by someone other than their reporters, you can be sure that they have permission and probably paid for it.
There stories are getting kind of quirky, however.
Maybe you should be talking to your attorney, and thinking about what you would normally charge to syndicate the story, or what UPI or others would typically pay.
Reporting on what another publication published is, I understand, in general OK. Sometimes the fact that a publication reported something is,in it self, news. For example, almost all major news sources reported the New York Post's "exclusive" story about Kerry's choice for VP, even showing pictures of the headline. I doubt that permission from the NY Post would have mattered.
I don't know if UPI crossed the line here. But it would be worth looking into.
I don't know what the usual relationship is. It was my understanding that frequently a wire service or other newspaper will purchase, for a small amount, the right to reprint or distribute a story written by another.
Local newspapers in different cities are not in competition with each other or with wire services (of course, AP and UPI are competitors), so there shouldn't be problems doing business with one another or having formal or informal agreements.
From my understanding, making use of the facts to write your own story is legal. I would think the phrase I quoted above, in the context it was used, crossed the line and violated the copyright. It is a factor that UPI was not reporting about the Chronicle or the reporter, but was reporting on the same subject and copying some of the words to reduce the amount of writing they (UPI) had to do.
However, I don't really know; a lawyer who specializes in news reporting would (for a fee, of course) have more knowledge about that.
I also suspect that a rights holder would have very limited rights to a derivative works claim when the original work was only covering an actual event. You cannot copyright facts. You cannot claim copyright on a short fragment that can only be said in a few ways.
I honestly do not know if what you are describing is infringement or not, mostly because that is an area of copyright that I have never really been that interested in. It has parallels to some areas of software copyright that would suggest that they are fairly safe, but there are also many ways that they are treated quite differently.
