FreeRepublic has had (dubious)copyright infringement claims made against it by certain publishers.
Are you arguing in favor of excerpting every article on FR as a means of preempting future copyright infringement claims? That is a new argument to me. FR obviously does not mandate or encourage that practice.
Well, duh! When I see a copyright notice on an article, I excerpt it. It’s not like clicking on a link to read the full story is a physical or mental struggle or anything.
More importantly, when you reprint a copyrighted article on FR, you are not doing Jim or the FReeper community any favors:
* These days, almost all things are copyrighted the moment they are written, and no copyright notice is required.
* Copyright is still violated whether you charged money or not, only damages are affected by that.
* Postings to the net are not granted to the public domain, and don’t grant you any permission to do further copying except perhaps the sort of copying the poster might have expected in the ordinary flow of the net.
* 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 vital so that copyright law doesn’t block your freedom to express your own works — only the ability to appropriate 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 generally a short excerpt and almost always attributed. (One should not use much more of the work than is needed 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.) Famously, copying just 300 words from Gerald Ford’s 200,000 word memoir for a magazine article was ruled as not fair use, in spite of it being very newsworthy, because it was the most important 300 words — why he pardoned Nixon.
Note that most inclusion of text in followups and replies is for commentary, and it doesn’t damage the commercial value of the original posting (if it has any) and as such it is almost surely fair use. Fair use isn’t an exact doctrine, though. The court decides if the right to comment overrides the copyright on an individual basis in each case...
- Brad Templeton, “10 Big Myths about copyright explained”
http://www.templetons.com/brad/copymyths.html