PSA: I wouldn't copy/paste from the PiPress if I were you ...
A post today reminded me of a fair warning I've been meaning to share with The Tumblrers: if you copy and paste from online Pioneer Press articles to your blog, you might find myself in serious legal hot water. That's because the PiPress's parent company, MediaNews, has partnered with a law firm that makes it its business to scour the Internet for its client's copyright-protected content, and then sue the pants off alleged infringers.
I won't get in too deep here; I encourage you to read about Righthaven and their legal and ethical issues in a piece I wrote for the Silha Bulletin a couple of months ago. But here are the basics:
It's very common for bloggers and other web users to either misunderstand or willfully ignore copyright law. Contrary to what some people think, the web isn't "public domain." Because of a variety of factors, including the sheer amount of content flying around on the web all of the time and the fact that it can be very hard to keep track of what gets copied and re-posted elsewhere, an unspoken rule of the Internet tends to be "share and share alike," or at least give credit in the form of a link or a hat tip (or "mustache twirl") where it's due.
But this unspoken rule is not the law, and in fact in some cases it constitutes a total violation of the law. The legal reality is essentially the same online and offline: if you take someone's copyright-protected content (the law assumes it's copyright-protected if they're the author or original producer of it) and you haven't gotten formal permission to do so, then you're violating copyright. That doesn't mean they will sue you, but it means they could.
For a long time, news organizations have bought into the "share but give credit" model, I think in part because they think it helps build brand awareness and reputation all over the web, and also because they simply can't afford to track down all of the people who might be ganking their content. The problem is that if somebody clips all of or even a lot of a single story and then posts it on his or her blog, then readers aren't likely to follow a link back to the original site and the original site gets no clicks and no eyeballs on its ads.
Now, there have been a couple of instances where content creators have taken down websites for wholesale copy-paste-profit operations (See Associated Press v. All Headline News) but for the most part, the big news organizations have left the small fry bloggers alone. As I said: who has the time (or cojones) to track down everybody who ganks your stuff without paying for it and sue them? Well, Righthaven does.
And the results have been a little shocking: much in the same way those old RIAA lawsuits against music pirates resulted in a handful of college kids and grandmas shelling out $5,000 settlements, the Righthaven lawsuits have netted both big time bloggers (Matt Drudge) as well as a handful of oblivious catbloggers. And the Righthaven folks don't eff around. A typical suit demands $75,000 in statutory damages and the forfeiture of the alleged infringer's domain name.
So if you're still reading this, you might be a little freaked out, and wondering how to avoid this mess. I'm not a lawyer, but here are a couple of things I keep in mind when I post:
Quote only what's necessary to make my point, never any more than a couple of sentences.
Always link--it may not make a difference in a lawsuit, but it's less egregious that way, and it's proper web etiquette.
It doesn't matter whether I'm making money from my blog or not--a common misunderstanding is that if you don't make money from your blog, and specifically off of the content you copy and paste, then you can't be held liable for copyright infringement. The law isn't there to stop the infringer from making money, it's there to protect the right of the original creator to profit from it, and he or she can't do that if it's already available elsewhere, free of charge or not.
If it's a photo, and it's not clearly labeled as available for my use under a creative commons license, ask for permission to use it, or don't use it.
Maybe I'm too careful or cynical, but the fact of the matter is if I do get sued for a copy/paste job, I'm doubtful that copyright law is going to be on my side.
