Quoting Blog Posts : Check Copyright Issues

How many times have you found something interesting on someone else’s blog and quoted it. Possibly many times. But are there any copyright issues involved?

Chilling Effect has compiled an excellent FAQ about Copyright and Fair Use and quoting what they say to this question -

Question: I found something interesting on someone else’s blog. May I quote it?

Answer: Yes. Short quotations will usually be fair use, not copyright infringement.The Copyright Act says that “fair use…for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright.”

So if you are commenting on or criticizing an item someone else has posted, you have a fair use right to quote.

The law favors “transformative” uses — commentary, either praise or criticism, is better than straight copying — but courts have said that even putting a piece of an existing work into a new context (such as a thumbnail in an image search engine) counts as “transformative.”

The blog’s author might also have granted you even more generous rights through a Creative Commons license, so you should check for that as well.

Blogging is a lot about quoting what others say and commenting about it. It is best to know your limits before you start copying the whole post of others and using it as your own or placing a small link in the end.

Always look for the copyright policy, privacy policy, “All rights reserved”, Protected under Creative Commons license and so on usually found at the bottom of the blogs. Remember that Creative Commons offers a flexible range of protections and freedoms for authors and artists and not all of them are alike, though some allow redistibution and copying, others are allow more restrictions.