Quote Originally Posted by Monkey@Arms View Post
Do you really think that the St. Charles Journal is losing revenue because someone on this worldwide board read the article on this forum? Its not as if they would have run out and bought copy of the paper, and no one is exploiting this intellectual property for commercial gain.

Jake

Quote Originally Posted by Brewboy View Post
The reposting of an article offered for free on the paper's website, with citation to the original source, and offered without an attempt of the reposter to profit, on a site whose purpose is not to report St. Charles news, would likely fall under the free use exemption of the federal copyright laws.
Yes, the Journal is losing revenue. They make money when people visit their website - by selling the ads you see. Exactly the same as with a print copy; when you buy a newspaper, the price doesn't begin to cover the cost of printing and distributing it. The revenue stream is in the ads.

And it is definitely NOT Fair Use to distribute an entire article. It would be Fair Use to use a brief quote/excerpt, especially when accompanied by a link to the original.

From the St. Charles Journal's Terms of Use (excerpt):

This Site and the material on the Site is owned by us and third party providers and is protected by international copyright, trademark and other intellectual property laws. This Site and the content provided in this Site may not be copied, reproduced, republished, uploaded, posted, transmitted or distributed without our written permission, except that you may download, display and print one copy of the materials presented on this Site on a single computer for your personal, non-commercial use only. "Deep-linking," "embedding" or using analogous technology is strictly prohibited unless specifically authorized in writing. Unauthorized use of this Site or the materials contained on this Site may violate applicable copyright, trademark or other intellectual property laws or other laws. You must retain all copyright and trademark notices, and any other proprietary notices, contained in the materials. The use of such materials on any other web site or in any environment of networked computers is prohibited. You may establish a hypertext link to this Site provided the link does not state or imply our sponsorship of the other site and further provided that you do not frame any of the content of the Site or incorporate into another website or other service any of our intellectual property.
Further, if you'd like to encourage MSM coverage of kilts, or any other subject in which you're interested, go to the site! Otherwise they won't know if anyone's interested - newspapers are constantly looking at their stats, to see what's popular.

I spend quite a bit of time protecting my own paper's intellectual property; it's something we take quite seriously. Generally, people comply pretty quickly with a take down notice. Those who don't, probably end up with some large legal bills. I'd hate to see a forum I enjoy so much end up with a major hassle b/c of IP violations.

A rule of thumb: posting a paragraph or two, and maybe a photo, with a link to the original isn't going to ruffle (many) feathers. Redistributing content can, and likely will at some point, cause problems.