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Topic: Copyrighted material
Drew07_2's photo
Mon 04/07/08 05:02 PM
Good! This has nothing at all to do with a conservative mindset vs. a liberal one. I realize that this is not MSN but when I moderated communities there years ago they made it very clear to us that they would not tolerate people copying and pasting articles and would get even more fired up over pictures. A lot of pictures carry copyright claims as well. We eventually got clarification identical to what Mike has posted. We would copy perhaps one paragraph and then give an active hyper-link to the site. This would force the reader to go to the site to read the entire article (if it was written by a community member) or at the very least link them to the site of the original host.

And that is the only fair way to do it. Getting articles written and accepted by bigger sites is hard work. They have hundred, perhaps thousands of submissions and they have limited space so they pick what they think will bring their readers in. If people are pulling those articles to other forums (like this one) it takes the original host site out of the picture. But what really upsets them (outside of traffic loss) is that the person copying and pasting didn't do any work at all! They just highlighted and ran away with it. They don't have to pay for site maintenance or upkeep, or for the website itself. They are paying for advertisers or sponsors who lose hits because of it.

I think that Mike has come up with a fair way for this to happen. I don't know Mike so there is nothing to be gained by my stating this except that under his rule we can still post the article teaser and a link. Perhaps this will also actually stimulate discussion, something that seems to get lost when an entire article is posted without further comment from the poster.

-Drew

no photo
Tue 04/08/08 03:38 AM
Edited by Disaronno on Tue 04/08/08 03:39 AM
This should also include cut/paste of the articles first paragraph, then posting the link. There are no questions, comments or anything. This also is a copyright infringement - as they tend to say "reproduction of any or all"

I don't mind if someone puts in a link to an article to provide additional info, but the current practice of spamming the boards with propaganda articles because you hate <insert person or group> highly detracts from any sort of true 'Current Event" discussion.

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