(Vanity) A Suggestion for dealing with excerpting/copyrighing issues

Me ^ | 01 October 2003 | alnitak

[alnitak]

As we all know, various news sources have requested that Free Republic users do not post their material here in its entirety. There have been several suggestions for dealing with this, mainly revolving around placing some sort of warning list on the "Post New Thread" screen.

I agree with that (it's not as if there isn't enough room) but we could also go one step further. I presume there is a database behind FreeRepublic, so...

Just create a lookup table of URLs which are on the "mandatory excerpting" list. Then, when a user posts an article, check the URL against this list and if a match is found simply force an excerpt of the article by truncating the body down to the current "excerpt length".

As a bonus, you could also use the lookup table to generate the list of must-excerpt publications for the posting screen.

All the Free Republic mods would have to do is check the lookup table every so often, for example when they get a legal letter from an organisation.

Result: less work for posters, and Free Republic can demonstrate that is has taken concrete steps to address companies' copyright concerns.

[alnitak]

Comments welcome, I'm trying to be constructive here.

[Leroy S. Mort]

Isn't that already done with LATimes and WashPost articles?

[Leroy S. Mort]

not the truncation..but a warning to excerpt I mean. So a data base must exist

[11th Earl of Mar]

Just create a lookup table of URLs which are on the "mandatory excerpting" list. Then, when a user posts an article, check the URL against this list and if a match is found simply force an excerpt of the article by truncating the body down to the current "excerpt length".

We already have that. Try posting an article from Newsday.

[alnitak]

Point taken! Ah well, at least great minds think alike :-)

Have a nice day.