Skip to main content

Four legal questions for copy-paste blogs

Cut-and-paste blogs result in copyright violations

E-Commerce Times carries an interesting article on Copy Cat Bloggers written by John P. Mello Jr.

Thomas Smart, who is co-chair of the intellectual property and patent litigation group at Kaye Scholer, explained that the courts ask four questions to determine if someone is making fair use of copyrighted material:

What is the nature or purpose of the use? "Commentary or adding your ideas to someone else's ideas or literary criticism are more favored than just copying for purposes of passing it on to someone or reselling it," he said.

What is the nature of the work being copied? "A work of fiction is entitled to more protection than the daily weather chart in the newspaper," he explained. "The higher the degree of creativity in a work, the more entitled it is to protection."

How much of the work was copied? "If you take an entire article from The Wall Street Journal or Newsweek and recapitulate the whole thing, that's more problematic than if you take a couple of quotes from it," he observed.

How did the copying affect the market for the copyrighted work?

"Bloggers, because they probably don't have legal counsel and often operate on their own, are more likely to copy more than probably is permitted," Thomas Smart, who is co-chair of the intellectual property and patent litigation group at Kaye Scholer in New York City, said.

Popular posts from this blog

How to Download Contacts from Facebook To Outlook Address Book

Facebook users are not too pleased with the "walled garden" approach of Facebook. The reason is simple - while you can easily import your Outlook address book and GMail contacts into Facebook, the reverse path is closed. There's no "official" way to export your Facebook friends email addresses or contact phone numbers out as a CSV file so that you can sync the contacts data with Outlook, GMail or your BlackBerry. Some third-party Facebook hacks like "Facebook Sync" (for Mac) and "Facebook Downloader" (for Windows) did allow you to download your Facebook friends' names, emails, mobile phone number and profile photo to the desktop but they were quickly removed for violation of Facebook Terms of Use. How to Download Contacts from Facebook There are still some options to take Friends data outside the walls of Facebook wall. Facebook offers the Takeout option allowing you to download all Facebook data locally to the disk (include

PhishTank Detects Phishing Websites by Digg Style Voting

OpenDNS, a free service that helps anyone surf the Internet faster with a simple DNS tweak , will announce PhishTank today. PhishTank is a free public database of phishing URLs where anyone can submit their phishes via email or through the website. The submissions are verified by the other community members who then vote for the suspected site. This is such a neat idea as sites can be categorized just based on user feedback without even having to manually verify each and every submission. PhishTank employs the "feedback loop" mechanism where users will be kept updated with the status' of the phish they submit either via email alerts or a personal RSS feed . Naturally, once the PhishTank databases grows, other sites can harness the data using open APIs which will remain free. OpenDNS would also use this data to improve their existing phishing detection algorithms which are already very impressive and efficient. PhishTank | PhishTank Blog [Thanks Allison] Related: Google

Digital Inspiration

Digital Inspiration is a popular tech blog by  Amit Agarwal . Our popular Google Scripts include  Gmail Mail Merge  (send personalized emails with Gmail ),  Document Studio (generate PDFs from Google Forms ) and   File Upload Forms ( receive files  in Google Drive). Also see  Reverse Image Mobile Search , Online Speech Recognition and Website Screenshots , the most useful websites on the Internet.