Hi, I am starting a blog that will cover a specific industry's news. In order to make sure I am on top of my competition (4-5 websites), I want to write about the same stories. My competition doesn't include opinions in their articles, only facts. So and so said this, this has happened, this product has reached this milestone, etc. Is it legal for me to take an article they have written and rewrite it? Rephrasing and entering additional facts, but covering everything theirs did? I am not rewriting their opinions or ideas, just the facts in the industry. Thanks for your advice
Copyright infringement requires copying. Any time you are copying you run the risk of either being a copyright infringer or being accused of being a copyright infringer, so I would counsel against rewriting. Having said this, at least in the US (and I believe elsewhere) facts are not copyrightable. What this means is that if you take the facts from a source you can use them yourself as you write your own, original article. The key here is that you write an original article. You can take facts and research, but write it yourself. In the US there are a lot of cases that say that a copyright infringer cannot defend based on what they did not take. The question is what you do take. So stick with taking facts and then any style, flair, opinion or additional substance needs to be your own and written in a way that does not appear as if you have simply copied. You may also want to look into relying on press releases. I do not have any case support for what I am about to say, but I have always myself believed that when a company issues a press release the intention is that others will take what they have written and liberally use it in articles they write. My opinion is that if there is anything that could ever be considered implicit permission to copy it would be a press release. When I find a news item that is worth my attention I will go to the website of the companies involved and see if they have issued a press release on their website. If they have then I liberally take appropriate parts of the release. Note, however, that you cannot do this with articles written by others. For more information about copyright law and fair use see: http://www.ipwatchdog.com/copyright/ http://www.ipwatchdog.com/copyright/copyright-fair-use/ Good luck. -Gene
If your going to that I would use the article just as a guide or research material so that your article is as unique as possible. I would avoid just using a thesaurus and changing thew words.
Information about permission to use releases is usually in the terms and conditions of the press release sites. For example, you can put PR Web feeds on your site (read the terms): http://www.prweb.com/publisher.htm
People like the above should not give advice on matters they do not understand (copyright laws) OP, do not listen to this guy, he has no idea what he is talking about. Go with what the other 3 posters have said and you should be clear of most legal issues. Its usually better to tell us what your location is as it would be easier for us to advise you. And remember, just because you don't see a copyright symbol on something, does not mean it is not copyrighted. Any creative work is copyrighted, to include site design and news articles.
I am in the solar industry. So I will be covering articles like... Solar Efficiency is boosted to xx% etc. An example article I would cover is: http://www.exduco.net/news.php?id=3222 which is a boost in efficiency. I would cover the facts of this story, and anything that is otherwise common knowledge like "But while polymer solar cells have been around for several years, their efficiency has, until recently, been low. The new polymer created by Yang's team reached 5.1 percent efficiency in the published study but has in a few months improved to 5.6 percent in the lab." I won't be taking the article and simply rephrasing the sentences, I would only take the facts and otherwise common knowledge and write my own with the original as a sort of reference to guide me in what I should be covering, etc
Hello. I'm a new member and I've been writing professionally since 1969. Of course all the writing I've done for myself has been as original as possible but the writing I do for my clients is always based on research derived from many different sources. I have some background in the legal aspects of professional writing and to the best of my knowledge when I rewrite other people's work using my own words, I am not in violation of any copyright law. I am not an attorney so I'd better hope I'm right about that because the cumulative damage from all my years of borrowing could be severe if I'm incorrect!
Yes true. In Thailand there is a case where an article(online book) was taken and just change the word uses in the article. The company get sued and lose the case Fact are uncopyrightable but writing style(the collection of fact)is. I agree with all the idea above that suggested taking only fact is fine.