| Just a quick housekeeping item. I've seen posts lately that are just wholesale postings of other people's work with no blockquoting, and no linking. That's not blogging that's stealing content. It's happened enough that I wanted to make a statement to clarify our policy.
First off what is "Fair-Use", Wikipedia defines "Fair-Use" as:
Fair use is a doctrine in United States copyright law that allows limited use of copyrighted material without requiring permission from the rights holders, such as use for scholarship or review. It provides for the legal, non-licensed citation or incorporation of copyrighted material in another author's work under a four-factor balancing test. The term "fair use" originated in the United States, but has been added to Israeli law as well; a similar principle, fair dealing, exists in some other common law jurisdictions. Civil law jurisdictions have other limitations and exceptions to copyright.
In blogging and especially at this blog it will mean that you must link to the source article, and you may only use at most four paragraphs of the linked article. This will give you plenty of copy to wet our appetite for the article.
Now of course there are exceptions. If you want to counter an article or blog post point for point, you may break the article up and comment on each section. That is fair use. The Angelic One often does this.
If you have formatting questions I refer you to our handy dandy html tag guide or better yet our differently winged friends at BMG have a really good soapblox tutorial on their site. I would also appreciate it if we would standardize on the blockquote standard for quoting, instead of italics, this is more a style guide and less of a requirment.
This post will be linked to in the posting instruction dialogue and in the About Us box. I and the other editors are serious about enforcement. It's me that will get sued not you. |
