h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Mikey, could you clarify the 'fair use' provisions for me? I provided a link, and did not quote the whole article - it was possibly more than 20% of it, (which is what NZ law allows) but I didn't think of that at the time. I even left the name of the writer there!

The reason I didn't just put the link, is because many people who are on h2g2 from their schools, or libraries or some workplaces can't follow links.

I think a lot of people get confused between plagiarism and copyright violations -- they are two completely different things. What you did -- giving the author's name and the source -- kept it from being plagiarism. You made sure that people knew it wasn't your own words, which is important.

But that doesn't change the fact that you still didn't own the legal right to reproduce those words for public consumption -- the newspaper owns those rights. This is where "fair use" rules come into play. You can quote small pieces of something *if* it is put in context of a discussion of the quote -- a good rule of thumb is that the quote should be no more than a third (or a quarter, to be on the safe side) of your post. Here, the quote was well more than three-quarters of the post. Just posting a big block quote and saying "here, discuss this" doesn't qualify as 'fair use' -- in essence, you were "republishing" the material rather than actually dicussing it.

If you don't want to just put a link, some things you can do in the future are to:

* summarize the article in your own words.
* have quotes from the article that are interspersed with your own comments, making sure that your comments are the bulk of the post, not the quote.

But convenience of other people doesn't get you around the copyright issue -- the newspaper has a legal right to insist that people go view the article there on the site; after all, they make money from advertisers every time people do.

Does that make sense? Let me know if anything isn't clear -- I really do think it's important that people here on hootoo understand this.


Mikey

Yes, I do understand - I have to say I was guilty of being lazy... because I was in a hurry, it was very early in the morning, and we were getting ready to go out, when the news alert came from the Washington Post into my inbox. I really didn't realise that it was more than three quarters of the article I had posted!

I don't want to put just the link, because I know from my own experience that some people aren't able to follow links.

But I'll do it differently next time.

It's not that it was more than 75% of the article that you'd posted -- it's that that much of the text of your post was from the article, and not from your own writing. A good rule of thumb is that your own writing should be the vast majority of any post or entry you create here -- does that make sense?

Thanks for being understanding, though!