Pasting newspapers' stories onto your site: Is it legal?

Here's a story http://blackathlete.net/artman2/publish/Baseball_20/Making_sense_of_Manny.shtml apparently written in the Boston Globe but cut and pasted onto another, profit-seeking site.

Even though the tag line offers some attribution, this isn't exactly like linking to the Globe's story, is it? When you read the story, you're not redirected to the Globe. I've got a hard time believing the Globe or any paper would allow its copy to be taken verbatim so that consumers can read it without going to the paper's site.

Or am I wrong?

 

Globe should sue them.

 

You're not wrong. And if the Globe catches it, my guess is they'll call blackathlete.net on it.

 

Unless the Globe made a side deal with that site, it's illegal.

 

Like Gomer says -- unless they cleared it beforehand, it's clearly copyright infringement. There's a story by Susan Slusser on there, too, as well as ones from AP and the Houston Chronicle.

Their legal notice:

For some reason, I think a few of these people might be surprised to discover that they're now "correspondents" for this Web site, which obvoiusly uses a different definition for "news gathering" than the one I learned.

 

OK. I was unaware of said threads. It's still an issue worthy of discussion.

 

We've got certain message boards in this neck of the woods that do this thing, too. I've reported it to our web folks, but nothing ever happens.

 

A perfect example of why our business is going to hell. The product is being given away for free and nobody seems capable of stopping it.

 

There is a Rivals.com message board in Texas which loves to steal stories and post them completely in posts.

One time I asked the site owner to please post links to our site and to quit claiming I was a correspondent for his site.

He didn't like me calling him out, but he no longer does it.

 

We have people who try to do it on our board, then get bitchy when I either nuke them or edit them down to a short excerpt. Eff 'em. Those stories belong to the originating sites, not any schmoe who knows how to cut-and-paste.

 

Since you were allegedly a correspondent, did you also ask him for a paycheck for those stories?

 

Ha. I'd never even thought about that.