So much of what bloggers do often involves repurposing material found elsewhere on the internet. In the best case, this consists of quoting a few sentences from an article or sharing a photo or video as the starting point for an original post. I have done this many times myself as I am often inspired to write about things that I find in online publications and blogs.
According to this article by Brian Stelter in the Herald Tribune, copyright infringement lawsuits against bloggers is on the rise. The article raises some interesting considerations that raised some questions for me.
My main question is, where is the line? Is it okay to quote a sentence? Two sentences? Three? A whole paragraph? And when it comes to dance, we share so many videos– it is safe to assume that if it’s on YouTube, it’s okay to share? What about other video sharing sites? I would not use someone else’s work– text, video, audio or otherwise, without crediting my source. But do I have a responsibility to get permission to cite them? If I do not have advertising or any other sources of revenue related to my blog is the standard different than for someone whose blog is an income-generator?
I’m curious to know folks’ thoughts on this, and any knowledge you have about legal precedents in this area.
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March 22, 2009 at 1:18 pm
TenduTV
I’ll try to respond somewhat cohesively, because you touch on a lot of issues here. First, a disclaimer… I am not a lawyer, so what I say should not be taken as legal advice. That being said, I have quite a bit of experience in this area.
The bottom line is that there are typically no hard and fast rules as to what counts as quoting, and what counts as infringement. Two important questions that you need to ask are “how substantial is the quote” and “does it affect the value of the original content.” Answering the second question is going to be the task at hand, since if the excerpt is substantial enough that people don’t go back to the original source, and the original source is unable to monetize, whereas the scraper is, that’s pretty much text book infringement.
As far as you not receiving any monetary gain, that’s irrelevant. It’s not what you gain, but what you prevent the rights holder from gaining. The fact that you don’t generate revenue has no impact on what kind of penalties you would face from infringing.
With YouTube and other video sharing sites, there is an explicit license in the terms of use that allows people and bloggers to embed video into other sites. The bigger issue there is the infringing content within the video (eg. music that hasn’t been properly licensed), but that liability won’t trickle down to bloggers (unless they’re the ones uploading the infringing content).
Overall, when it comes to infringement via scraping, what makes this particularly juicy is that the potential for clearer discovery is there, which may reduce plaintiff’s litigation cost, and encourage more action in this area.
Specifically… you write an article that is quoted by three sites. One takes a sentence or two, one takes a paragraph, and one takes an excerpt. It will be immediately transparent during discovery as to the exact impact of the size of the “scrape”, which means the damages will also be clear. Before, measuring the impact was nebulous and difficult (read: time consuming and expensive).
March 23, 2009 at 9:57 am
danciti
We discussed your post on the site today.
http://danciti.com/post/89033337/content-scraping-wheres-the-line-a-time-to-dance
You might also want to read Wikipedia’s entry on Fair Use. It’s pretty concise:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#Fair_use_under_United_States_law
March 23, 2009 at 11:22 am
danceadvantage
Thanks for putting your questions out there, Maria! Good stuff.
And Marc, thanks for your insight. Very helpful, as always!
Nichelle
March 23, 2009 at 1:32 pm
Maria
Marc, thanks so much for your thoughtful comments on this. The point about increasing ease of discovery is a good one…not that I have anything to hide
The thing that really pisses me off the most is those bots that copy posts wholesale and attribute it to someone else just to get your hits in a google search (this is the worst offender). I feel powerless to stop things like that though because I do not have the resources or wherewithall to pursue getting these things taken down.
Danciti, I appreciate the additional resource. Thanks for linking to my post.
March 23, 2009 at 1:44 pm
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