Is it legal?

Hello,
I have a lot of free information that I have collected from various websites regarding a certain niche.

I wanted to inquire, is it legal for me to take all this free information available put it on one site and then sell membership to that site?

I was thinking along the lines, that I am not charging them for the information, rather for the time spent collecting this information and bringing it to a central place.

Please let me know if this is legal

 

Whether you are charging for it or not, it will depend upon the content in question as well as the source(s). If the information you have collected is copyrighted then you very likely are not allowed to re-publish it for free or otherwise.

 

I think it is legal, . Some other sites has the same content with different publisher.

 

its legal just do it

 

if the content is claimed to copyrighted then it is now allowed to redistribute (even for free) without the explicit permission of the copyright owner.
Some copyright like those of Creative Commons have extended information on what you can or cannot do with the content including distribution (with attribution or without) and whether it can be used for commercial purposes.

While it is unlikely you will get sued directly a DMCA takedown is imminent.

 

Pretty positive its legal

 

It depends on what you mean by "information." If you are taking facts that you've read and then creating your own content, that is fine. If you are copying articles or pictures from other sites, that is illegal whether or not you are charging for it. If you are copying phone numbers, addresses, or other factual information, that should be legal since no one can own facts. There was a lawsuit in the US regarding copying from a phone book (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_v._Rural) which established that factual information alone is not copyrightable.

 

If the content you collected is copyright then you can not do this but if it is free available you can use it...

 

If the content is legal, your operation is legal.

 

The content is only legal to distribute if they have a policy that specifically states that they are allowing the free use/distribution of it. It is very rare that content is free to use how you wish so probably is not legal.

If you want to do it anyway you can set your website up so that users can upload the content, upload as a user and place a DMCA policy on your website so that the owners can request it be taken down. A DMCA request is the first port of call for content owners and if the owner of the website is not the uploader they cannot be held responsible.

Setting your site up this way makes it really hard for content owners to hold the website and its owner responsible for the content provided you act on DMCA requests.

 

This is an easy question to answer:

1) You can't post the content of others. They own it.
2) You can summarize the information in your own words.
3) You can use short quotes and provide link backs to the site for the full article (don't abuse this.)

Those are your options. Note, you may have some rights in how you compile information but probably not here.