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

I know the site of which Angola speaks, and I was surprised when they actually sent me an email asking my permission to use a story I ran. I stupidly said yes.
Why stupidly? Because when posted it said:
By Joe Schmoe
Special to Rivals.com

I figured they would at least link or attribute it to my publication. Nope.

Not sure if that was better or worse than seeing a story I did show up on a national college website. They attributed it to me and where I worked, but as far as I know, never asked out permission. (Then again, since technically my work becomes the papers, they coulda asked management and they okayed it without my permission, but I figured if they did they did they woulda told me.)

 

It's time to get serious about this shit. The Online Music industry didn't take off until it realized it had to crack down on people who illegally distributed its product, even if it meant suing the crap out of a 15-year-old high school kid. BlackAthlete.net or a fan message board might be the web site equivalent of a 15-year-old high school kid, but it's gotta be done.

I'm tired of the talk about the demise of our industry. A good product is the backbone of a good business. Ask Warren Buffett. We've got a good product, no matter what people say. I'm tired of hearing, "People can get what we provide elsewhere." No they fucking can't. Who else can ask Brian McCann how his hamstring is feeling or Bobby Cox who is Opening Day starter will be or Doc Rivers why Stephon Marbury was in the line-up last night? 90 percent of the stuff that is in my copy on a daily basis is information that could not be obtained except by reading myself or the handful of other reporters who cover my beat.

We need to eliminate the other delivery systems. They are pimps who do not have to pay the prostitute, and you do not eliminate them by playing nice. It's time to get serious. Of course the value of the product will slip if you do not protect that product. Air Jordans don't cost $100 because they cost $100 to make. They cost $100 because you can only get them from Nike.

 

Of course music companies started allowing Apple and Amazon to sell digital music.

 

I know this is a whole other thread but
Beyond that there's the little stuff:

Had a call today a guy wanted to know what website he could go to to find the Big 12 Tournament bracket or at least who Baylor was playing.
I flat out told him I can't tell you where to find it online, but I can tell you the complete pairings are on Page 2 of today's section of our paper.
By now I'm used to some smart ass responses people give like "Oh I'm on the road and didn't get today's paper." Which I've once replied..." And you have our number saved in your cell phone?" Stumping that idiot...BUT...
this guy was just like "Oh." and said he'd get a paper. I genuinely believed him.
I wonder if the information-now train has gotten a lot of people forgetting what exactly a newspaper does. Too bad that instead of trying to remind them, too many are instead just jumping on board the train.

 

It's a slippery slope with some of those clowns.

I have a tennis blog on our newspaper's site that gets well over 100,000 hits a month. And unlike the multitude of tennis bloggers who never leave their caves, I actually go out and cover Grand Slam events, writing for the newspaper chain as well (or did ... nobody's going anywhere these days).

I probably also put 5,000 photos on the blog that I took myself. And the bloggers steal them all the time and put them on their sites, without linking or attribution.

When I call them on it, they go ballistic, or play dumb, or get offended. I tell 'em the photos are owned by my newspaper, and they're actually not allowed to just take them. Like, dude, just because it's on the web, doesn't mean it's free.

One guy told me to "prove I had taken the photos" because he had stolen them from someone who had already stolen them from our site. He then proceeded to spam a long list of e-mails from my shop - including the publisher, the sports editor, the editorial letters e-mail, et al - cutting parts out of the e-mail I had written him (which I admit wasn't pleasant).

And he just didn't stop. I managed to placate him, and fortunately the higher-ups realized he was an asshole.

But I'm way more careful now. Those guys think they are invincible, because no one can really find them.

Learned my lesson.

 

The message boards are a double-edged sword -- I don't have a problem with someone copying a paragraph and throwing up a link, so long as it's not entire stories verbatim. I'd think message boards generate a fair amount of traffic to newspaper sites and blogs ...

 

i agree mediaguy, and that's why i asked the rivals guy to do just that. shit, i gave his site credit for a coach hire.

 

It's almost not worth the time, but with photos at least there are a couple options...
1. You can make the site one of those where the right click is disabled...popping a copyright mark when someone tried to click on a photo. It's kind of a pain to do especially for a popular blog....so option
2.Is watermark the photo. It may not seem like a great option to have something like www.myfreakintennisblog.com on the bottom of you photo, or wherever, but beats trying to track down these guys. At least that way if they see the photo on another site, they might go to yours anyway.
I've seen a couple pro photog sites that have their photos up on their site and look great, but if you right click or try to download it any other way, the photo that pops up has a huge watermark across the middle. Probably not worth the trouble to invest in something llike that, but a cheap watermarking (if not free) tool can be found out there

 

I've been told that whenever a certain local paper puts up a story about the team our fan site follows, it draws ten times the hits of anything else on their site, with the majority of them tracked back to us. Since they only put a few of their stories online each day, I've even asked their Web editor to upload a couple of columns precisely so we could link to them and send their site some traffic.

(I'm a subscriber and the writer is a friend, so I'd like to think we're helping him as well as his paper.)

 

disabling the right-click option has been effectively neutralized by the snipping tool in vista. you can make an exact copy of any photo, then save it and slap it up on photobucket and it's yours. i'm not really sure how to protect yourself from this ... there's no way to block anybody from using the snipping tool. it won't give you a high-res copy but it will give you a copy that on a web site looks fine. very easy way to circumvent copyright rules. this is a tough one. nobody wants to slap a URL on the bottom of a photo (which can be cropped much of the time anyway). a watermark doesn't look great but may be the best option.

 

The answer is no, you can't republish a copyright story or image under a second copyright without a prior agreement.

And that goes for pasting copyright text and images to this board, too.

That said, it is up to the original copyright holder to police its content. And publishing a summary of copyrighted material is another matter.

 

Sent a message to folks I know at the Globe about this. Interested to see how they'll respond.