About content copyright

[forceoflight]

Greetings,

I have thought about start to develope a site. At the moment I need a lot of content (text). I have been wondering if I could use content from other sites. Some why I am not so sure if it is legal. Is it legal if I add link to the site where I have copied the content and I don't charge anything from the user for reading the copied content?

Could someone talk through what kind of rights do people have for content coying? How much can I copy from other sites if site have copyright label?

BR,
FoL

 

[enlytend]

I have been wondering if I could use content from other sites. Some why I am not so sure if it is legal. Is it legal if I add link to the site where I have copied the content and I don't charge anything from the user for reading the copied content?

No, its not. Unless they site says somewhere that you may to use their content on your web site, or you contact the site owner and get their permission.

Never use someone else's work without permission. Copyright laws apply regardless of whether or not the site has a copyright notice or symbol.

 

[Keral_Patel]

It cannot be used on your site if the site you are getting content from gives you a right to use it. Or it falls under other type of licenses like Wikipedia falls or commons creative license.

Some sites also allow to copy articles if you keep the resource box intact.

 

[enlytend]

Sites that allow you to use their content say so explicitly and will detail the terms of use someplace on the site (or point to a license like Creative Commons, GNU free documentation, etc). Some examples are Wikipedia (as Nick pointed out), "e-zine" article banks and most US government sites.

There is also something known as "fair use" - this pertains to using a short quote of someone else's work for things like reviews, commentaries, news reports, etc. There is no strict legal definition of "fair use". You can read what the US copyright office has to say about it here

 

[user-7256]

If they licensed their work in such a way that you could use it (probably with conditions), and even if you abode by those, Google would not like your site for duplicate content.

 

[Dean]

So could you copy stuff of wikipedia since its meant to be open source or something like that?

 

[enlytend]

I don't know that because its "open source or something" - I know that because I found this footer at the bottom of the page:

All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. (See Copyrights for details.)

And the Copyrights link leads to a page where it gives more detailed information including the following :

Reusers' rights and obligations

If you want to use Wikipedia materials in your own books/articles/web sites or other publications, you can do so, but you have to follow the GFDL. If you are simply duplicating the Wikipedia article, you must follow section two of the GFDL on verbatim copying, as discussed at Wikipedia:Verbatim copying.

If you create a derivative version by changing or adding content, this entails the following:

* your materials in turn have to be licensed under GFDL,
* you must acknowledge the authorship of the article (section 4B), and
* you must provide access to the "transparent copy" of the material (section 4J). (The "transparent copy" of a Wikipedia article is any of a number of formats available from us, including the wiki text, the html web pages, xml feed, etc.)

You may be able to partially fulfill the latter two obligations by providing a conspicuous direct link back to the Wikipedia article hosted on this website. You also need to provide access to a transparent copy of the new text. However, please note that the Wikimedia Foundation makes no guarantee to retain authorship information and a transparent copy of articles. Therefore, you are encouraged to provide this authorship information and a transparent copy with your derived works.

Example notice

An example notice, for an article that uses the Wikipedia article Metasyntactic variable might read as follows:

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Metasyntactic variable".

Want to know if/how you can use some other site's content? Read!

Just because you "may" use content from someplace doesnt mean its a good idea. As eholt pointed out, Google doesn't like duplicate content - you're likely to find your pages banished to the very end of the search results.

You'll get the most benefits from your content if you write your own original articles - or hire someone to write for you.