I'm looking to start up a news website and was wondering about the legality of the most common issues that will come up. I'm quite new to this and have read conflicting opinions about what is, and what is not legal. For instance, is using an excerpt of an article with the source and link-back to the original content legal? How about linking a photo from another site? If anyone can help me with these issues, I'd be grateful. Expounding upon other issues that may crop up would be even better
If you will notice, news from the entertainment section of Yahoo comes from EOnline! while their top news stories from Associated Press. They repost the news items from these media outlets as is; but this comes with a price: they pay for the syndication fee. In this regard, it means you cannot repost any news items AS IS, yet, no one can hinder you to rewrite these news items. Since they are news, they are meant to be picked up. And by picking up here means, you should rewrite the news articles (in your own words of course) and create a link back to the site to give it credit. You can do it like so: Title: This is My Rewritten News Item Content goes here. Read [Yahoo.com] (Note: Yahoo.com, the name of the site is your anchor link. The link must point to actual news item.)
Thanks for the reply. Is that the case even if I don't post the entire article, just an excerpt of it?
Are you planning to put up an RSS aggregator-sort'a kind of site? If this is the case, I think you can go ahead with your site without any legal repercussion on your end. RSS feeds aren't illegal. However, your site would look just like any other "splog" or spamming blogs out there. Many people refer to sites that simply aggregate or quote an excerpt from news sites or other blogs as spam blogs.
Once again, thanks for the reply. I do not plan on using an RSS feed for it, rather, I'm planning on consolidating articles from all over the world that are relative to the topic of my site. I can re-write a short description if need be, but it would greatly shorten the time if I can just include the first few paragraphs from the article itself before the link to the full article on the website where I found it. Also, this will be only a part of my site. I plan to have self written editorials/articles written a number of times a week too. I'm still debating with myself exactly how to go ahead with managing the content of my site, whether to re-write a brief summary of every article or not. Your input is much appreciated.
This is legal information, not legal advice. I am not licensed to practice law in any state, so do not rely on this as advice for your particular situation. Generally, in copyright law, if you take *something* from an original work, you're making a copy of part of the other person's work. This is infringement. However, there are two things that may save someone from infringement, possibly -- fair use and implied license. Fair use is really hard to judge, but basically, people can take part of a copyrighted work and use that part to parody or criticize the original. For example, you can quote an opinion piece in order to rebut it. Commercial use weighs towards infringement. Second, implied license -- I don't know what the case law says, but I would venture to say that if someone puts an RSS feed up, they're "impliedly" giving permission for people to use that rss feed for *something*. Just what that something is might depends... That feed could be intended for personal non-commercial use, or they could allow remixing and other uses of their feed.