Concerns over Clicking and Pasting

[fountainhall]

It has always been common practise for posters to post quotes from media sources. Some are complete copies; others only extracts. Some add the hyperlink. A few do not, and at least one poster has been criticised for not doing so. The issue I feel should be raised, though, is that of copyright and the possibility that by quoting complete articles, even with a hyperlink attached, this Board may eventually lay itself open to a copyright infringement suit.

Some will no doubt say that other sites do it, so what's the problem? After all, after publication it's in the public domain. Well, in fact it is not. It's exactly the same as a movie, or a book, or any other work where the intellectual copyright remains protected for many, many decades.

Frankly, I am not a lawyer and do not know the legal position in Thailand. What I do know is that around the world the media is taking greater steps to protect its own copyrighted material.

The matter has been aired at least a couple of times on another gay Thailand Board. Last Spring, one poster wrote –

I just finished my conversation with a lawyer in USA. He said that few cases ever appear of Copyright Infringement where someone posts from a newspaper, but that it is possible and more papers are starting to pursue this. His firm deals with this on a regular basis and he said he has never seen a suit from a nNewspaper that would sue a site like ours as we are very small potatoes. That said, he did say that if they choose to sue, while they would not win, it would be very costly to pursue on our side and thus make the outcome irrelevant.

He said the appropriate way to make these posts are to take a segment (approximately half of an article or less) and post it with a link that says something like, For the remaining article see:

This creates incentive for users to go to the original source.

Lastly, he said that if the above is done and there are comments on the content of the article from the original poster, there is no court that would ever see this as infringing on their rights.

http://www.gaythailand.com/forums/topic ... entry49764 Post # 8

I also noticed that when I tried to copy and paste a sentence from an article in London’s Financial Times, I received the following message –

Please respect FT.com's ts&cs and copyright policy which allow you to: share links; copy content for personal use; & redistribute limited extracts. Email [email protected] to buy additional rights or use this link to reference the article - http://www.ft.com/cm...l#ixzz1MZoctt2O

The above comments clearly relate to print media in the West. However, with media in most parts of the world, including Asia, gradually limiting access to their sites and trying to draw traffic through subscriptions or through occasional free sampling so readers can see paid advertising before reading an article, there surely remains that possibility that any site which routinely quotes complete articles may lay itself open to legal action.

My own view is that

- articles should never be quoted in their entirety;
- when making direct quotes from any article, posters must use the 'quote' icon;
- a summary can be provided of that part of the article which is not quoted;
- a hyperlink is added at the end so that posters can then easily read the complete article if they wish.

This is GB’s Board and he makes the rules. I only make the above points in an effort to be helpful.