Forum Moderators: phranque
They find new articles on a topic, cite the source, and then show the first 200 words on a topic, and at the end of the the 200 words they have a link to the pull article.
[/quote]
Title
Author
Source
<First 200 words>
Link to Full Article
[quote]
Is this still fair use? I have always just used a sentense or two, just to tease the link and tell the reader "This is what you will be reading about". But this site is actually using other people's articles as content, and they have no content of their own!
If it's the kind of site that adds value through its selection process, where authors and publishers would likely want to be linked from, then 200 words still feels like its on the high side but IMO isn't necessarily too much.
Teh reader has to get a taste for the article.
As a rule of thumb, perhaps the limit should be something like 500 words or 10% (whichever is smaller) with a 50 word minimum.
Of course, if the copyright holder's permission is given, then there is no problem
Kaled.
Use in a classroom is COMPLETELY DIFFERENT from use on a for-profit web site. The 10% rule of thumb is generally used for academic non-profit purposes. That will not fly for your web site.
But I'm not a lawyer. All I would suggest is that you use extreme caution if you think you can simply copy hundreds of words from someone else's web site and get away with it. It just doesn't pass the smell test, frankly.
Also, fair use assumes you give proper attribution.
I'm no lawyer either, but all of us (most of us?) have a sense of fair play.
On the outside (large segments quoted) you might have a long article about some work from a famous author. Shakespeare say.
There's no way you can deal with that without copying large word counts.
What I don't understand, is why the pond scum don't just write their own stuff!
If you can write to this forum, you can write onto your own web pages.
At the very worst, scrapers could paraphrase (if'n they know the meaning of the term)
I start to suspect, unfairly maybe, that scrapers are neuron challenged. They will say they are pressed for time. I'm reminded of "typos" which usually come from those who just can't spell properly.
All in all, I think scrapers, plagiarists and the like should be loudly exposed. Maybe that will encourage them to keep their children in school a little longer. - Larry
[edited by: engine at 1:33 pm (utc) on April 17, 2005]
[edit reason] formatting [/edit]
I wasn't suggesting anybody here didn't have a sense of fair play. I was just pointing out that there doesn't seem to be any context here for what the use is for, exactly.
From another site, I found that the Copyright Act provides that the "fair use of a copyrighted work for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use1), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright."
This is very specific. It doesn't allow for scrapers. And let's be clear what a scraper is, at least the traditional definition that I understand. A bot that copies is a scraper. A person who copies is a plagiarist (or possibly legitimate copier, as in the fair use instance).
So almost by definition, a scraper cannot fit into the fair use doctrine as above since the bot hardly has scholarship or other such uses in mind. Whether some other provision of the Copyright Act applies to a scraper is another question but again, this gets to the importance of having a discussion based on specifics.
Kaled.
There could, in theory, be only one sentence in a thousand word piece that contains all you need to know. If that's the sentence that gets quoted, it isn't fair use. It takes human judgement to decide how much text oversteps the mark.
There's almost no way quoting one sentence isn't fair use, especially since the information in the sentence can't be copyrighted, only the specific way it's expressed.
Rosalind is right that the effect on the original author's market is one of the key considerations, but it's very likely that this site is creating a LARGER audience for the article. If that is the case then the author has no actual damages and one of the considerations for Fair Use is clearly met.
