Hello everyone, Just launched my very first forum last week and member interactivity is quite low i gotta admit content is not of superb quality but before i bring in more stuff and such. I want to know if it is ok to pull out content from blogs and news site without the owner's permission? Ofcourse it will be properly quoted and a link will be posted as well. Sorry if its a stupid question im not really familiar with the blogging or foruming netiquettes. Thanks!
Not a stupid question at all. Personally, I think it is okay if you give FULL credit to the original author and explicitly quote where the information is from and give a URL. If this is not met, then I would suggest you don't do this. Some authors don't like it, in which case they would probably nicely ask you to remove the content.
It would be better to use something like an RSS posting bot, and then pull the RSS feed from those sites. After all, that is what most sites put an RSS feed on there for. As an example, VBulletin has an RSS posting bot built in. You can set it to pull post from yahoo, CNN,, sites like that. The bot creates a thread, post a couple of paragraphs, and then a link back to the source. The other site gets a back link to the article and you get content.
Thanks a lot guys! I never knew there's a bot to do that! doh imagine the time it would save me with that one lol thanks a lot!
No it's not okay. What you describe is copyright infringement. It's one thing if users post are placed on your site but when you post it yourself then you are liable for copyright infringement. If a user does it then it falls under the DMCA and you're protected as a provider. If you make the posts and add the content yourself you lose that protection. Get your own content. It's the best way to get members anyways. How is copying what's available elsewhere going to help you?
well after checking the sites some allow it some don't and you have to contact the administrator and they let you fill up a quick form and purpose and then they allow you to get RSS feeds. ofcourse unique content is always the way to go, but sometimes you just need to share the news.