Hi, Is it legal to quote about 2-3 lines from a news website and then put a "read more" link linking to the orginal news website?
If you make it clear that you are quoting from a source (quotation marks) and don't copy more than 10 per cent of the original article, it is fine to do as you intended.
Thanks for the reply. Do i have to put quotes marks? If i have a read more link linking to them, isn't that enough?
Quote marks (simpler) or without quote marks you'd need something like: From the Daily Blah xxxxarticle snippetxxxxxxx.... read more
Yes, also this should be fine only if you are quoting the paper once or twice. If you build your own parallel news site with hundreds of such quotes(without their permission), then you should prepare for a lawsuit.
I have a question around this subject. If it's paid content (subscription based) and you're not cut and pasting a couple of lines, what is the issue there? In other words the report would read as the following: "[Website] reported on Tuesday that Bob smith visited with the football team. According to the report he's leaning strongly about signing there." If the report is several hundred words, and that's all you're quoting, what type of infringement would there be? Ian
You might get into trouble for copying and pasting lots of content in any case, especially if it's paid content. The only exception to this (even for paid content) would be if you are reporting it in third person the way you mentioned above. Bloggers all over the world do this and there is nothing wrong with this. But as I said, quoting word to word (in huge amounts) can be tricky and the best way imo would be to drop the news site an email with a link to your page and ask them if it's ok if you are doing this regularly with lots of articles.
In general if you place the source of the story you will be fine. You can of course also reword the story in such a manor the story stays the same but not in the same context as the originating site. i.e. Source: John Howard went to the store and pulled out his gun to rob the store... Your version would be: John Howard arrived at the store and pulled out a gun to rob the store owners... It's the same but only rephrased. Some sites specificly forbid to copy and paste their content without written permission such a Reuters.
I think the rephrased method is better, the story still containing the same objective, but different phrase .. so it will not run out of topic.
My biggest question would be paid subscription news content. If you're basically posting a third person report crediting the source, is it infringement simply because of the fact it's being taken from a service that requires customers to pay to use it? My feeling would be no simply because you're posting one or two sentences about something you read, and doing it in a manner as I posted earlier. This is an issue on a messageboard I run where a user was doing that, and also providing a link to the story (which required normal users to sign up and pay for an account if they wanted to read it). I read the actual report and read what he posted, and in my mind there was no issue as he posted it as I did above. Ian