On my new music website, I want to add news. I want to add news. But to get this news I need to basically copy it off other sites. Can I just copy and paste articles from some Yahoo news and then put a link to the story item? Or is this illegal? I'm thinking of just using PRweb but they dont have too much good news. Please give advice on how to get news.
No. You cannot do this without the permission of the copyright holder. The only way you are going to get news is to create it yourself or buy it. Since you have a music site you can write your own reviews. Perhaps other people will contribute reviews. When something is happening, you can research it on the internet and elsewhere and write your own version of the story. Under the fair use rules of copyright you would be able to include brief quotes from other articles as long as you properly credit the source.
You can't publish the whole article, but there is the principle of 'fair use' or something like that where you can display the first sentence of the story and make the title of the story click-able to the original source. Here I use a feed from Google news (through carp) to provide links to: homeless news. That is 'fair use' or whatever they call it.
Yah always make sure you list your sources and do not put up the whole article as you are not the original author and should not be getting credit for it. Like i have 2 news sites, on both I'll use some paragraphs from sites and then I'll link to those sites with the rest of the information. But I've never heard of any blogger or publisher thats been busted for doing so anyhow, it's just common curtosy.
I sent out a bunch of emails to various news agencies and some said it's ok but I was dissaproved by at least one site. So actualy it would be smarter to check out with your sources first cause they were the one that wrote it originaly and it's not really fair to republish there articles.