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Legal Commentary

: Discourse.net

Blognetnews Copies Discourse.net

By Professor University of Miami School of Law

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Blognetnews is ripping off discourse.net. The license for this site allows only non-commercial sites to reprint my content — if they attribute it properly and share their content under a similar license. Blognetnews is commercial — so when it copies this much of my content that’s a copyright violation. And its copying the full text of many posts vastly exceeds any definition of fair use. (And since I have a share-alike license and Blognetnews doesn’t that is another violation of the Creative Commons license.)

Blognetnews claims that it is engaged in fair use, citing some cases involving search engines as precedent. The courts in those cases found that the search engine uses were “transformative” which means they altered the content in some way that kept it from being a substitute for the original. But blognetnews isn’t a search engine: it’s just a blog, reprinting all of, or a chunk of, my blog posts only a short time after they go up on this site by pulling it from my RSS feed. That isn’t transformative use — it’s called “copying” for commercial use. And under the copyright laws, that’s not allowed unless my license permits it. Which it does not.

If your site is non-profit, you’re welcome to use as much of my content as you wish so long as you attribute it properly and share alike. Or you’re welcome to contact me and we’ll work something out. Or if your site is commercial and you quote the occasional post to comment on it, I’m fine with that — even if you disagree with me. But if your site is commercial and your business model is based on taking all (or even a big chunk) of my RSS feed — and that of lots of other people — and running it on your site with no value-added, then I don’t see why I should work for you for free.

Oh yes, the legal guy used to be doing the same thing. They had the good sense and good manners to stop as soon as I asked them to.

Full post as published by Discourse.net on March 29, 2008 (boomark / email).