Linking to and Quoting News Articles

Cool_CM

Hi guys, I was reading a thread in AH just there and saw this post which had been edited by a mod saying:

[MOD]Don't cut and paste whole articles - it's lazy, impolite, and a breach of copyright.[/MOD]

What is the official story with this? I generally quote whole articles, cite the source and also link to them (eg. News stories in the Rugby Forum such as this), seeing as I find it annoying when I am either in work and cannot visit the news site, or when reading the thread on a mobile.

Ths isn't any form of attack on mods or "dual standards" or anything, but is it a forum to forum/mod to mod thing or is there an official line?

Cheers

sceptre

There isn't a site-wide official line. And I'll be honest, I've been slack at times about enforcing what should be a reasonable line on forums I mod and it's one of thsoe things that will have to be dealt with at some point.

Here's what I think though, to allow reasonable discussion, be fair to the author, the publisher and to stay within copyright rules:

• Always provide a link to the original source
• Always make it clear that it's someone else's writing to avoid basic plagiarism (quote boxes are good)
• Preferably include details of who wrote it and what newspaper it was in, in the case of newspaper/magazine articles
• Don't quote the whole thing, quote relevant excerpts, the link to the original will allow people to read the whole thing if they wish.

It's the last one I've been slack about enforcing in forums I mod and it's also generally the case elsewhere. In Irish copyright law you're allowed to quote relevant excerpts for review or discussion so that would be OK and necessary but yeah, we could all do better to enforce it as necessary. As it happens, none of the news organisations have objected so far to my knowledge and it's one of those "things that are often done" on the Internet and it's not something they're unduly woried about at the moment as long as it isn';t done wholesale. But at some point they might and it'd be within their rightsw to do so.

Best practice would be to follow what I've bullet-pointed above - it'd be fair, reasonable and best for the copyright holders and us as a site and community.

Incidentally, I'm officially posting the above as a regular user rather than an admin (I'm not speaking for the site as there isn't a "policy") but the solution is the same in the long run. Hope that helps, feel free to ask anything else on this if I've been less than clear - as I've a great interest in online communities (in particular this one as it happens), copyright law and fair use as it's implemented in Ireland and around the world and I'm a Politics mod where views on articles are often used to kickstart a discussion, I could talk about this stuff all day (happily for others, people don't usually let me:))