US Copyright Laws

Discuss the impact of copyright laws on interactive websites

[GoNC]

As I've mentioned before, my company manages numerous message board websites. Many of these are localized, targeting people in specific regions.

We've recently come across something of interest.

When something happens in the news, people will go to the local newspaper website and copy the article to the message board discussion.

And, well, the newspaper isn't always happy about that, since it's no longer sending eyes back to their ads.

I totally understand their complaint, but I don't think there's a technical way on my end to prevent someone from copying and pasting from a specific site (I obviously am not going to disable pasting entirely).

So I'm curious what you guys consider to be both the legal and ethical approach here? I'm about 99% sure that we (the website owners) are protected by the Communications Decency Act of 1996, but ethically, what can I do?

[htmlbasictutor]

You have no way to moderate the postings?

Like put the quoted information in quote tags and edit it down to an intro and provide the link to the whole article.

Put posting guidelines on your sites. Something like:

"Quote only a small portion of the news/article you wish to share and provide the source link"

[GoNC]

No, there's no way to specify to ONLY do that with articles copied from the one website. To my knowledge, there aren't any identifiers that come through to specify the origin.

Being a message board, people paste things all the time that would be entirely appropriate, so truncating anything that's pasted isn't really an option.

[lucy24]

there's no way to specify to ONLY do that with articles copied from the one website

If your users habitually copy huge slabs of text from copyrighted sources, a single newspaper will not be your only problem.

:: idly wondering if these users are the same people who become incapable of cutting-and-pasting when it comes time to forward an email ::

[GoNC]

? I didn't say that they habitually copy from copyrighted sources. I'm referring more to jokes, poems, quotes from other users, etc.

Further, our posts are in Rich HTML, so when they paste they're also pasting HTML code (which is parsed and edited automatically). So a short joke of, say, 500 characters could easily double in size, if there are <div style=''>...</div> tags around each line.