Copyright issues

[toolman]

Say I'm writing some web site copy and I'm using some others people's stuff ( why re-invent the wheel).

Should I use a "bibliography" at the end hyperlinked by numbers to the appropriate text in the copy.

Should the text be hyperlinked to the original from the copy itself.

Is there another way?

[agerhart]

I would use numbers instead of making the text hyperlinked........personal opinion

[Brett_Tabke]

(btw: welcome to the board Toolman...lol)

Umm, "when you say "using some other people's stuff". How do you mean that? As in legitimate excerpts under the fair usage clause, or are you talking entire documents?

[toolman]

Umm, "when you say "using some other people's stuff". How do you mean that? As in legitimate excerpts under the fair usage clause, or are you talking entire documents?

Using it verbatim in bits and pieces...more like quoting what they wrote word for word. I see the term "fair usage clause" in your post so there is a standard somewhere?

Thanks for the warm welcom Brett_Tabke. This is a nice place you got here sir. I'lll make it a point to stop by more often.

[Marcia]

A lot depends on the amount and purpose of usage. The Cornell info is pretty complete:

[google.com...]

[Brett_Tabke]

lol tm.

Fair usage. You are allowed to use small experts of original copyright work. I'm not a lawyer, but more that a few sentences is suspect and a copyright violation. You certainly can't copy a whole work or even close to a whole work without the original authors permission.

[toolman]

So then excerpting a few sentences and putting a bibliography reference number next to it and hyperlinking to the original from the bibliography page is acceptable, yes?

[chiyo]

The spirit of "fair usage" is so that an original work can be critically reviewed, or as part of a research/academic endeavour that builds on the previous work, therefore allowing the reproduction of portions as a part of the process.

It is not meant for copying material to "stand alone". A small number next to a quoted peice of text linking to the original would not be enough in our view. You have to make it very clear that what you have quoted is somenone elses work and not yours, and attribute it.

In an academic or research work, readers are used to the still of numbers relating to the priginal work, but almost always the name of the original source or author is also referred to in the text.

you need to ask yourself whether the method you use for attributing content is "fair use". Ask yourself your motive - am I reprinting this material just to add content to a page so that it almost looks like I did it, or an i reprinting it as part of a review, and/or adding value where of course the orginal authorship is a key part.

For our part as a site with much commissioned original content, we would not be happy if people reproduced more than a paragraph without making it clear that the work was ours. A small number, in our view would not be enough, and we would be suspicious that we were being quoted as a way to fill up another page, rather than in the context of critical/satirical review and in the spirit of adding value to the work.

That's the spirit of the law. How it is interpreted is of course the job of the lawyers. It is also the traditional interpretation. Internet publishing adds some new elements to the equation, including the value of keyword optimised links, and maybe even the sophistication of a site's readership to be able to understand clearly that the quoted portions of an original work belongs to someone else, and that the there are clear pointers to the origonal and how to access it.