on content, ownership, copyright, and more in the modern web

[acroyear]

The Questionable Authority : Can Copyright Evolve With The Internet?:

But some media executives are growing concerned that the increasingly popular curators of the Web that are taking large pieces of the original work -- a practice sometimes called scraping -- are shaving away potential readers and profiting from the content.

This is a valid concern. Most for-profit websites (including this one) get their income from advertising revenue. Pageviews are money. At the same time, while the concept of "fair use" may be fairly vague, there really are quite a few valid reasons to quote - and even quote extensively - from someone else's work.

The question, of course, is where the line is. And where the line should be. The two questions are: where the line is, and where the line should be. And if the line should be there at all. The three questions are...

Seriously, it's a complex issue.

Comments

[thelongshot.livejournal.com]

On the Extremeskins board, one of the rules about posting news stories is to post only part of the article and have a link to the rest of the article.

Course, on the flip side, it is tough when you are trying to search for old articles and find that they aren't publically available. That makes it tough to make arguments on the internet when everyone doesn't have access to the same information.