Copyright Challenge for Sites That Excerpt

[groovedaddy]

When the popular New York business blog Silicon Alley Insider quoted a quarter of Peggy Noonan’s Wall Street Journal column in mid-February, the editor added a caveat at the end: “We thank Dow Jones in advance for allowing us to bring it to you.”

The editor added “in advance” because Dow Jones, the publisher of The Journal, had not given the blog permission to use the column. The excerpt was published with the assumption that it would be permitted under the “fair use” statute of copyright law.

Generally, the excerpts have been considered legal, and for years they have been welcomed by major media companies, which were happy to receive links and pass-along traffic from the swarm of Web sites that regurgitate their news and information.

But some media executives are growing concerned that the increasingly popular curators of the Web that are taking large pieces of the original work — a practice sometimes called scraping — are shaving away potential readers and profiting from the content.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/02/business/media/02scrape.html?th&emc=th

[Warpy]

1. The four paragraph rule here at DU is a good one

because I go to the original content most of the time and might not have had I received only a paraphrase as to its content.

I just wish the BBC would learn the difference between paragraphs and sentences.