How much illegal is copying the content of a website?

I suppose that copying the content of a website is illegal. But doesn't it depend on the type of information you are copying?

For example how much illegal is to copy news articles from a popular website and put them on your website? I have often seen the same articles on various sites? What does that mean and isn't that illegal?

Another example would be copying only factual information such as data about a movie: title, actors in it, budged, year, etc. Is that illegal? If yes then is it illegal in the same way the example above is illegal?

 

Copying material from a news site is just as bad as copying from any other site. The reason you see the identical news articles appearing on a variety of legitimate sites is because they have a license to republish material from sources like Reuters or Associated Press. That does not give someone else the right to republish the material.

As for factual material, such as the title of the movie and the list of actors appearing in it, purely factual information is not copyrightable. However, you have to be careful because the selection and the organization of factual material can create a new work that is protected by copyright. In other words, you could copy the facts and compile them in a new fresh manner, but if you copied all of the information and the structure, you might be violating someone's copyright.

 

It depends upon the website and their terms of service to be honest.

Some bloggers for example love it when you share their content (I know I do).

You want to make sure you give proper credit if they warrant it.

Basically, it's a case by case basis. But the rule of thumb is to never use someone else's content without their express permission.

 

If you're running a very popular site (alexa < 10000) then you should worry, otherwise nothing is really going to happen.

 

If you're using a quote from a site or perhaps quoting a paragraph, remember to quote the source; you're covering yourself legally that way, the worst that would happen is you'd receive a request to remove it.

What you should be more concerned about is a Duplicate Content penalty from Google. If you're relying on Google for your traffic, DO NOT copy content- you won't rank if you do, plain and simple.

The above is a bullsh!t response which cannot be claimed as fact without so much more information.

Webdev

 

Lol it's not bullshit it's common sense, nobody is going to take the time, energy and thousands of dollars it would take to sue someone for stealing their content and posting it on a site that makes next to nothing and isn't impacting their site in any way.

I've even stolen content from site's and used it on site's getting 100k+ hits a day just from the stolen content and haven't had anyone coming to sue me or any legal action taken against me.

 

You're an absolute moron.

Since when did Alexa rank = how large a corporation is? A) They might not have a significant web presense, being predominantly an offline company. B) Alexa is one of the most INACCURATE tools for measuring traffic there is (only users who have the toolbar installed contribute towards the statistics). C) Just because one person hasn't been caught for doing such idiotic acts doesn't mean everyone will get away with it.

Sorry buddy, you're wayyyy off the mark here.

WebDev

 

I might get away with murder; but that doesn't mean I'd do it.



Belgin fish I see your point, but are you really advocating the dissemination of stolen content?

:/

 

It is completely illegal for sure, because something that was written and already published is a subject of copyright and it's just a matter of time until the true owner of the content will use some duplicate content checker like plagspotter.com out of curiosity, and discovers that someone is stealing his work. In best scenario you will just get punished by Google if the owner submits DMCA takedown request and in the worst you can even get in trouble with the law (in case you have used that content to make a profit).

 

If you're running a Wordpress blog, there's a new plugin you can install that stops copyright infringement. It also detects copyright infringers automatically, and creates DMCA takedown notices for you that you can file with a single mouse click. The days of cheap blog scraping software are numbered...