Ooops

I akways feel guilty snippetizing the article because people will think I am editing it to suit my agenda. Part of the reason I quote the whole article is to show I am not leaving out one side's perspective. In the future I will adjust this, though sometimes I feel like I personally am responsible for boosting several PNI writer's award eligibilty (and google profile) considerably.

Maybe, instead of speculating on the merits of posting articles in lieu of websites or how to attribute portions, maybe Uncle Cranky, our “deus ex machina” should wade in on this with the assistance of some legal types since this impacts the entire board.

It seems silly for non-legal types to debate these issues and hope to come up with some valid answer.

Ok...skip the legal angle. Morally, it's wrong. Someone writes an article to make a living for a company who pays them so that they can sell those articles either via print distribution or online and collecting advertising revenue. If you take that entire article, and post it somewhere else, you're stealing their ad revenue, whether the law says so or not. If they company makes less money, they pay the people creating the content less money.

I have written many peer reviewed and published technical articles and have never once been offended by someone quoting me at length or my work. In fact, I find it flattering – unless they fail to ascribe it to me and use it as their own.

Congratulations. Is it your primary source of income? Did you publish them on a web site which you used to generate ad revenue? Did you attach a notice of copyright such as this, which is on www.philly.com?

If you did, you might feel differently.

Now that is a stretch. A couple of paragraphs of text take up so little storage as to make them nonexistant. Same goes for bandwidth. We are talking about a few bytes out of probably more than 100 gigs. That's like claiming that licking the crumbs off your fingers is making you fat.

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This is a stretch if not downright bogus. I think actually the publishers get paid for clicks on internet published material whther those clicks are "live" or robots and by including the link to the article in another high-googling discussion PB posters would actually be considerably boosting the ad revenue for the original publisher. Companies, including internet content publishers, actually pay professionals to try and seed the kind raised google profile that comes from 3rd party linking and discussion that happens on PB. Think about how much PNI has made in ad revenue from the "shooting map" in discussion after discussion here on PB, for example.

I'll take the argument that if they say they want to officially give approval for the quotation of their content they mean it, but the arguement that they lose ad revenue is actually backwards from the truth of the situation. PB quotation and discussion boosts their google profile and ad sales.

The moderators have discussed this in the past, and the consensus was to allow full postings. I disagree with that decision, but i'm not a lawyer.

I agree with RaiderA and (as much as i hate to admit this) NeedAHouse that posting full-text articles is probably not covered by Fair Use. As NAH pointed out, most posts would fail 3 of the 4 tests. However, most discussions of Fair Use must be qualified with a word like probably, because neither Congress nor the courts have set a clear standard.

I do agree with Sean (and others) that PB's discussion of Inky/DN articles is probably good for the Inky and DN's income. That doesn't change the fact that their articles are protected by copyright.