As a publisher we license a number of news feeds from various suppliers and reprint (legally) their content on our site. Quite a few other competitors then often rewrite that news article, citing the news feed vendor as the source - which indeed they are. This comes under various "fair use" policies around the world. However, it is very fast becoming obvious that they are actually reading the content from our site and copying it - not subscribing to the original source directly. This comes from the time delay etc. on our license agreement from the original source and various other methods. What I ideally would like is for the copier to state something like "blah blah blah, reports newsfeed via website." The difficulty is - how on earth could we even enforce such a thing. Indeed, is it enforceable ? I get the impression that what they are all doing is not strictly illegal, but probably unethical - which makes a legal approach difficult. We have caught one or two doing this where they also left in our edits/additions to the articles we buy in - and they failed to cite us as the source. Unfortuantly, they got better at editing us out of the picture Ultimatly, I guess I am just a tad miffed that they are not paying their fair dues for a license to the original source, just parasiting from my sites - and then not even being polite and citing us!
It is unethical for sure but not strictly illegal as you rightly said. Try and email them and explain your concerns and maybe they will stop ripping off your stuff.
Not always protected and fair use doesn't cover most scenarios. You may want to save the best examples and then send a letter stating that the infringer doesn't avoid copyright infringement by changing a few words in an article. You have collected enough information to show the pattern of their illegal conduct, etc. Worth a try.
I can understand you being 'miffed' that they're not sourcing you but you really have to decide whether or not the effort of going after them is worth it or not. Maybe your efforts would be better spent making your content better?
It's pretty simple. 1. You are NOT the source. The original writer/media outlet/whatever is the source. They don't need to mention you. Why would they? 2. You have no ownership of the content. That's pretty much it. If you have legally edited your source and they copy your new version, that's potentially another issue.