Jonathan Bailey has been doing a bang-up job writing about and fighting plagiarism on the Internet. If you are a writer, blogger, photographer, or artist, his website, Plagiarism Today, should be on your must-read list. (Although he has a greater focus on written works.) In a recent post, Jonathan talks about The New Plagiarism and how there’s a gray area that some bloggers are treading into that comes very close to violating “fair use” guidelines when it comes to republishing other bloggers’ content.

The article is particularly focusing on blogs whose content heavily block-quotes other content, give link love and attribution, but do not necessarily add an equal or greater amount of fresh content. For example, a site might consist of posts where half the article is a large blockquote and the other half is original commentary - or worse. These blogs, Jonathan suggests, are treading on “fair use” guidelines.

The Berne Copyright Convention developed copyright guidlines which all member nations of the United Nations supposedly follow. Fair use, by the Berne Convention, dictated that no more than 300 words of a written work be republished, and only to exemplify a point or as a base to build an idea, or teach a concept, etc. On the other hand, if the original written work is less than 300 words, you’ll be republishing the work in its entirety - which you may not do unless you have the permission of the copyright holder to do so.

By the letter of the (copyright) law, that actually means that inserting a third-party RSS feed, whether partial-text or full-text, violates copyright, unless you have permission from the author. When in doubt, ask. Similarly, if you use, say, 150 words and later 200 words from the same piece of written work, even on two different posts on your website, you are violating fair use rules. Your total usage, in any collection of writing, of someone else’s specific work, should not exceed a total of 300 words, unless you have explicit or implicit permission.

Another potential gray area is the reuse of someone else’s RSS web feeds on your own web pages. By inserting an RSS (or Atom) feed, you are reproducing many snippets of text from many articles. These snippets provide a link back to the original articles. Many websites welcome this, but may do not. The problem is that it’s essentially the same as if you wrote a bunch of articles in print and I copied and republished the first paragraph of each article somewhere else.

Because the Internet and a collection of technologies make it so easy for so many, people often mistakenly believe that it’s okay to copy or excerpt as much as they like. The worst offenders are those websites that republish song lyrics or poems in their entirety, without permission. But since most of these appear to be fan sites that do not try to monetize the site in any way, they are often left alone. Lyrics publishing rights are often owned by some publishing company, not necessarily by the author. The publishing company would no doubt be unhappy about copyright violation. But some might say that this sort of copyright violation is actually beneficial to the artist in question because it promotes them - something that’s usually not true for photographers.

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