News Rights?
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If were to post a new story on my blog, in order to comment on; would I have to get reprint permission from anywhere i.e. AP news, yahoo news.
I tend to see a lot of sites that simply cut and paste stories. not sure if this is legal or just to many of them for the story owners to track.
Any help is appreciated
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Under fair use in copyright law (many countries) you can use excerpts of stories and sometimes whole articles as long as it is not for commercial purposes. As an individual and if you are not someone who does this on a massive basis I don’t think you have anything to worry about.
There are various licensing arrangements such as Creative Commons which give certain permissions for reprinting so check the site from which you are getting the information to see what their policy is. Even under strict copyright you can make some claim to fair use, as I said, if it is not your habit or sole purpose to reprint.
Many people do just repost stories and other content created by and belonging to others, without comment from other places and that can become a problem for them.
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Do be very careful about AP as they have seriously restrictive use policies and have been going after people. I remember reading that they base their fees for use on the number of words used (yes, they make you pay for it).
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For reference, see this article at boingboing: http://boingboing.net/2008/06/17/associated-press-exp.html
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Also this should be required reading for anyone in your position:
http://www.templetons.com/brad/copymyths.html
In short you probably can post excerpts from news articles provided you meet a bunch of conditions (“not commercial” is one of them but that’s not sufficient by itself). But there are no clear rules governing how much or when you can safely do it, so it pretty much comes down to “don’t make yourself an easy target for lawyers”. Don’t quote more than is necessary to make your point, make sure you are adding something substantial in the way of criticism or commentary, and always attribute it clearly and include a link to the source. That doesn’t guarantee you’ll be in the clear but it at least addresses the most common mistakes.
Like most US based hosting companies, WordPress.com is governed by the DMCA and we are required to remove material from blogs if we receive a copyright infringement notice — whether or not we think it’s fair.
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As with anyone else who blogs, whether mainstream media or otherwise, the expectation is that you will snippet or exerpt their works, and editorialize on them. That law of etiquette does not change whether it’s the AP or SomeDude.com.
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@rain-AP has become the RIAA of the news media. I’d tread lightly there.
Brad’s site is the best; readable and understandable. It was one of the first sites I referenced for a FAQ I wrote for knitters.
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