Web Writers and Copyright Infringement

I started my morning having to deal with not one, but two, copyright violations. Two different individuals had "borrowed" entire articles I wrote and republished them without my permission. Only they weren't "borrowing" anything. They had committed theft.

There are some people out on the web who intentionally steal others' work, but I have come to believe a lot of copyright violation is due to laziness, ignorance of how copyright works, and confusing copyright with plagiarism. I'm sorry to say I have no miracle cures to offer for laziness, but I hope I can help to clear up the confusion around copyright here.

What is copyright?
There are a good number of sites that explain copyright in detail, so I'm not going to do that. What I will do is simplify it. At the most basic level, copyright is the right of an author to determine under what circumstances a work will be copied.

But I gave attribution and a link back....
Most of us learned in school that it's not OK to claim another person's work as our own. So people think all they have to do is give the author's name and a link, and they can do pretty much anything they want with content they find on the internet. It's true they aren't committing plagiarism, but could still be guilty of copyright infringement.

What about fair use?
Yes, your particular reasons for copying a work may be allowable under exemptions for fair use (or in Canada, fair dealing.) Fair use is intended to protect the public interest. For example, it isn't likely an author would encourage a critic to quote passages of a book to illustrate why he gave it a low rating. Reviews that warn people not to buy a poorly written book are in the public interest, and the right to express a personal opinion is protected. So in general, critics are allowed to quote passages from copyrighted works or to include clips from copyrighted music or movies in reviews.

What is exempted varies from one jurisdiction to another. Fair use and fair dealing exemptions cover a number of areas, such things as personal study, research, teaching, commentary and news reporting. Be careful! Whether a use qualifies as "fair" will also upon other factors like your intent in copying a work, how much of the work you copied or how many copies you make, whether an alternative was available and whether your copying of the work had a financial impact on its creator.

Copying a few stanzas of a poem in your English term paper may qualify as an educational exemption, but photocopying the entire poetry anthology to avoid buying it at the college book store probably doesn't. Similarly, you probably don't have to seek permission to quote from a newspaper article if you want to write a blog post that discusses current events. If you are expressing yourself with the help of excerpt from the text you read in the paper, your use of the content probably qualifies as "fair." The same would not hold true if you copied the full text of an article from the electronic edition of the paper and sent it to your mailing list with no commentary of your own. Posting to a public forum such as a web site, blog, mailing list or discussion forum implies multiple copies of the content. Distribution of the full work without permission is a copyright violation, and there is no exemption for "sharing." Your right to share isn't protected by fair use or fair dealing, just your right to express your own thoughts and opinions.

If content is available online, the best policy is not to copy it at all. If you need to refer to the document more than once, go back to the site of origin. If you want to share the content, you can post or email a link with a brief excerpt or a comment of your own about why your friends (or co-workers, students, fans, followers, or whatever) might want to read it. You can also take advantage of a ton of social networking and social bookmarking sites: Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Technorati, Stumbleupon, Reddit, Delicious and Furl are all examples of sites that allow you to share a link with friends or to bookmark content for future reference. And most sites now feature a "share" button that allows you to quickly post a link to the site of your choice. Sharing could not be easier - even for the lazy folks!

We writers are thrilled when you share a link or a bookmark for our work, because it can bring new readers to us. Yes, we like the exposure we get when you post an entire article to your newsgroup. Unfortunately, many times the result of you sharing this way is that we lose income because the revenues from displayed adds are only generated if you and your friends view our articles on the original web site.

You won't always be able to tell if this is the case, so don't try to guess. You can always ask us for permission. And if we can, we may just give you permission to make a copy. When you respect our copyright, you leave us in control of those decisions about the works we produce and own, instead of trying to make them for us. And that's exactly the point of copyright: that it is the author's right to choose.

Sources:
Brad Templeton, "10 Big myths about copyright explained" and "A brief intro to copyright." personal web site

"Copyright basics: Fair dealing" and "Text (print and electronic)." Concordia University Libraries

"Fair Dealing," University of Calgary Libraries and Cultural Resources