More copyright complaints

Free Republic | April 8, 2004 | Jim Robinson

[Jim Robinson]

As most of you are aware, we've recently received several copyright complaints. In the last few weeks, we've received complaints from the SJ Mercury News, Independent (UK), SF Chronicle and The Boston Globe. Just a couple days ago the Post-Gazette send a cease and desist notice and yesterday I heard from the Tribune-Review.

Tonight, I got a call from Amy and there were two more registered letters at our PO Box. The McClatchy News (Sacramento Bee) and USAToday are now added to the list of publications that have complained about copyright violations.

Well, folks, the handwriting is on the wall. The complaints are now coming in faster than I can respond to them. John is currently in the process of writing programs to search out and automatically excerpt all existing threads from these sources.

I think we're gonna have to go to excerpt and link for all news sources very soon unless we have written permission on file.

[sweetliberty]

"it may be worthwhile to determine if these same papers have lowered the hammer on sites such as DU and similar."

The DU has always exerpted. Can't say about the others. I think there are some who do and some who don't. I don't really spend enough time on other boards to notice.

Ping y'all.

[FreeAtlanta]

Excellent point. There really needs to be some way of storing these articles. Jim, can you write a program to download the links and store them in your database? Then, have a search that will pull excerpts out of the article in relation to the search?

That would prevent the convenient amnesia of the left-wing publications.

[Landru]

"Well, folks, the handwriting is on the wall. The complaints are now coming in faster than I can respond to them. John is currently in the process of writing programs to search out and automatically excerpt all existing threads from these sources."

*Excellent*.
If ya can't castle or block, then move.

"I think we're gonna have to go to excerpt and link for all news sources very soon unless we have written permission on file."

So be it.

But the "truth" of their lies, distortions, spin & all-round propaganda to the unwashed masses will get out, nonetheless.

No let 'em go to work and pay their bloodsucker sheisters to do something else.

...like writing law to prohibit excerpts? ;^)

[FreeAtlanta]

Jim, maybe you could also then provide a link by that day to that article through http://www.waybackmachine.org/ or some other archiving service....atleast, until the information Gestopo gets to them too.

[Mudboy Slim]

"I think we're gonna have to go to excerpt and link for all news sources very soon unless we have written permission on file."

Whatta hassle...MUD

[sweetliberty]

"I'm having a hard time remembering when Judicial Watch successfully represented a client to the END of the case."

I believe that jnarcus was referring to the ACLJ (American Center for Law and Justice). That is based in Virginia and was founded by Pat Robertson.

ACLJ

[FR_addict]

Jim,
If you need to raise money to fight these lawsuits let us know. They are definitely trying to take our freedoms away.
This sounds like an unexpected expense.

Did these companies show specific threads that weren't excerpts in their complaints?

Do we have a list of the newspapers that don't mind us using their full articles, published somewhere on Free Republic? We need to let the good guys know that we appreciate them.

[Landru]

"Whatta hassle..."

Hardly.
An *incovenience*, yea sure.
But nothing that cannot -- easily -- be overcome.

I needn't teell you the truth & freedom always comes with a price, my friend.

...& the price they're exacting's cheap.

[Doc-Joe]

It does smell of an organized campaign. Perhaps we should fire back. If anyone here has a subscription to any of the rags listed, perhaps it is time to cancel.

[4mycountry]

Oh, ok!

I was just teasin' with the excerpt thing.

[texasbluebell]

From the link you posted, here's an excerpt from a further link within it (emphasis by original writer, except for underlining done by me):

from this site:

http://www.templetons.com/brad/copymyths.html

The "fair use" exemption to (U.S.) copyright law was created to allow things such as commentary, parody, news reporting, research and education about copyrighted works without the permission of the author. That's important so that copyright law doesn't block your freedom to express your own works -- only the ability to express other people's. Intent, and damage to the commercial value of the work are important considerations. Are you reproducing an article from the New York Times because you needed to in order to criticise the quality of the New York Times, or because you couldn't find time to write your own story, or didn't want your readers to have to register at the New York Times web site? The first is probably fair use, the others probably aren't.

Fair use is usually a short excerpt and almost always attributed. (One should not use more of the work than is necessary to make the commentary.) It should not harm the commercial value of the work -- in the sense of people no longer needing to buy it (which is another reason why reproduction of the entire work is a problem.)

Note that most inclusion of text in Usenet followups is for commentary and reply, and it doesn't damage the commercial value of the original posting (if it has any) and as such it is fair use. Fair use isn't an exact doctrine, either. The court decides if the right to comment overrides the copyright on an individual basis in each case. There have been cases that go beyond the bounds of what I say above, but in general they don't apply to the typical net misclaim of fair use.

The "fair use" concept varies from country to country, and has different names (such as "fair dealing" in Canada) and other limitations outside the USA.

Facts and ideas can't be copyrighted, but their expression and structure can. You can always write the facts in your own words.

[John Robinson]

Something like that is already in place. Over the next few days I'm going to apply my auto-snip tool to reduce the corpus down to a permissible size. That action will be logged in the edit history of each article. The original body will be available to a select few, which may or may not include more than the moderator staff--depending upon how poorly the auto-snip performs (depending how frequently we'll need to re-snip the article, to select a meatier cut.) Auto-snip only grabs the first few significant sentences, and not with much thought at that.

Later tools could be applied (to new posts as well) to select facts... names and dates... to populate some type of search table. Quotes can be extracted as well. And other tools could be written to monitor changes in the source article and report differences automatically.

These complaints are truely a blessing in disguise. Getting rid of the constraints of the full text operation open many doors for Free Republic. "That which does not kill us only makes us stronger."

[VOA]

I know it sounds paranoid, but I wonder if this represents a coordinated
attempt to render FR less useful.

If so, I'd say to all these "copyright complainers", especially the ones of
nutburger liberal ideology...
"Too Late, Your Emperor's Clothes have already been exposed!"

Along with talk radio (and it's expansion to streaming on the Internet and
going out to XM radio), the copyright complainers may place a partial muzzle on
freerepublic...but it will always be a leaky and WORTHLESS one.

Plus, they'll just earn a reputation for being SoreLoserGirlyMen
that can dish it out, but a world-class wussies when it comes to taking legitimate criticism
for their "BIAS" (thanks Mr. Goldberg).

[texasbluebell]

BTW, how does Google get by with caching news articles?

I'd like to know the answer to that too.

[CatoRenasci]

Back when the Washington comPost only requred birth year and zip code, I would pick random obscure places with almost no population and be a very old female. It wouldn't accept that I was a 103 year old woman from Big Stone Gap Virginia, but a 98 year old from Sebastopol California worked fine. Go figure.

[texasbluebell]

I don't believe the perpetrators of this attack should be allowed to go unchallenged.

Agreed. I like your idea of upping donations, there are probably enough posters who would be willing to do this.

They're pushing us, and we have to push back. We have to find a way.

[mabelkitty]

Perhaps a moratorium on newbies so we don't get disruptors signing up to deliberately sabotage us?

[dpwiener]

What's particularly upsetting about this is that the original sources will pull the links, destroying part of what you set up FR to do, which was to create a database that we can search.

Jim, what's to prevent you from storing the entire article on your computer, even though you (automatically) only displayed an excerpt on the discussion thread? The entire article could still be searchable. Then at some time in the future, if a person were to perform a search which found a match within the article, it could display just the paragraph containing the search term along with a link to the original discussion thread.

This would appear to meet the objective of archiving past articles which the liberal media would otherwise try to throw down the memory hole. Critical quotes and comments could be located. And yet it would also fall under the Fair Use criteria, since you wouldn't be re-publishing the copyrighted item on the Internet, merely keeping a copy for personal use.

[The Old Hoosier]

But you can't use a Nexis account to publish entire articles. You'd have to ahve a private forum and every Freeper would need an account to post.

As far as buying into syndicates, that costs a lot, too, and you'd have to buy all of them.

There is no easy solution, but the best one is to excerpt wisely from forbidden sources.

[Pan_Yans Wife]

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