I am intending to build a website with some news updates from different news sources. I have seen websites doing this and copy the whole piece of news from a certain news source with just a tagline mentioning about the source. I am wondering whether this is violating the copyrights in the internet world. Thanks all
This is really an undecided area of law, and anyone who says differently is speaking out of ignorance. That being said, you must be careful -- because the law could be decided against you in the future. What you do today could suddenly be deemed to be illegal in the future. And, because it is suddenly deemed to have always been illegal, you will instantly be guilty. Kapish? LawPundit has an informative post on this topic, Copyrights, Blogs, News, Content Aggregation and RSS Feeds.
YES, this is a violation of copyright law. It is not "undecided". People have done this with my articles in the past. I usually send a polite email out asking for the content to be taken down. If I the stolen article isn't taken down, I send a DMCA notice to the person's host, which forces them to take the content down. If I published a new book titled Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallway which consisted of exactly the same content as Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, but left a note at the end of the book stating everything in the book was written by J.K. Rowling, do you think that would be fair? Posting other sites' articles on your site can also hurt both your site and the article owner's website because of Google's duplicate content penalty. And is it really fair for someone to earn money using someone else's content? Even if you bother to leave a link back, no one is likely to visit it and it still constitutes copyright infringement. There are no "its ands or buts" about it. It is clear and blatant copyright infringement. Anyone who tells you otherwise needs to read Title 17 of the U.S. law code.
This is a complicated issue. News is in the public domain which means it isn't copyright, however the production (article, broadcast etc) of the news is subject to copyright. Most websites rarely use the whole article, what they usually do is produce an article about the article and make sure they name the source. This is permissible under "fair use" providing you only use small portions of the article or broadcast.
Copying an article in its entirety completely flies in the face of copyrights. While its true that grey areas exist it's one thing to make "fair use" of an article by quoting a small portion and totally another to copy an article or its RSS feed in its entirety. Did copying someone else's work fly with your English teacher? Of course, not. It's called plagiarism. If you're serious about learning more about plagiarism, content theft and copyrights go visit Plagiarism Today. Regards, Robert