I wrote a post on an animal lover's forum about a vaccination clinic event that the local shelter was having. The information in the post was obtained directly from the shelter's published press release. The shelter found the post and now wants me to remove and stop posting their vaccination clinic events. There reason is "due to the general guidelines, policies and date changes that we have for the clinic at this time, we advertise only through our website." But that isn't true, there are about 3 pages of search results for the same vaccination clinic schedule or "copy/paste" of the press release. Can they make me remove the post from the forum?
Press releases are distributed so that others will copy them. If they issue a press release they are giving implicit permission for others to copy and distribute. Additionally, the facts that are contained in the press release, including dates and times for the event, are not copyrightable. Facts cannot be copyrighted, only expression and here they have given permission for their expression to be taken and used by others to promote their vent. I would not worry about this from a legal standpoint. If you want to be nice because their request seems reasonable that is another story. Perhaps if and when they do change the times they get angry folks who learned about it elsewhere. For more on US copyright law see: Copyrights -Gene
Thanks for the information. I am thinking more along the lines of if/why are they singling my forum post out... After all, there are atleast 30 other websites. (Some forums, some blogs and local MSM.) Does it more has to do with the ranking of the forum post; it's double indented above the newspaper and televisions stations websites as well as the "donate-here" websites. So far the dates have not changed from their original press release.
If they've publicly issued a news release, you can publish that information. It would be good to add a note about the dates being subject to change though I suppose, and maybe link to their official site if you're not (if you're reporting news, you should generally do that for verification's sake anyway).