Warren Kaplan wrote:
Suppose there were one or two paragraphs in the article that were worthy of discussion on this board (or any other forum). Perhaps there was some question about the advice given. Would it be okay to quote those paragraphs (either by just typing them out or by actually using a copy machine to copy just those paragraphs and then posting them) for the soul purpose of discussion? Or, would some waiver from the holder of the copyright be necessary in order to post just a few paragraphs?
I'm not trying to get into a hair splitting contest here but I just want to know if the copyright laws apply in the absolute to even a fragment of an magazine article or a few sentences quoted from a book. We all see portions of written material taken from other sources used all the time online or in print media. Is permission required in all those instances? Even in news articles??
Warren,
This is troubled water, with few hard-and-fast rules. But as a general rule there should be no trouble about lifting a couple of paragraphs and quoting them verbatim.
Note, however, that the amount of material you copy is not the main thing. It's the amount of damage you do to the financial prospects of the copyright holder. By that, I mean that if you quote all 10 lines of a 10-line poem, you have lessened the poet's chances of selling it for financial gain.
As a vague rule of thumb, authors and journalists often think of 250 words as the absolute maximum for a claim of "fair use." But that would be 250 words taken from a much larger manuscript, of course.
The essence of fair use is that you should not use more than is necessary for "a proper purpose" and that your use of it should not impair its value. (In this regard, you might even
increase its value by giving it extra publicity, of course.)
A "proper purpose" is one of those quoted by Sea Hunt in his researches above. But you might like to know that ideas and facts cannot ever be copyrighted. Only the exact form of the work, the exact words you use, can be copyrighted.
So you are free to paraphrase an author's work as much as you like. In other words, say the same thing in different words. You would want to attribute the original author, of course, and the name of the work, to avoid any hint of plagiarism.
But in general you are free to quote without prior permission bits and pieces of an author's work for the purposes of education or discussion as long as it doesn't hurt his or her pocket in any way.
Cheers,
John V.