Giving away the product for free online

This certainly speaks to this dicussion on several levels.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/chi-0704140006apr15,0,7406434.story?coll=chi-business-hed

 

If you are truly a lawyer, you'd never believe that anything is as cut-and-dried legally as your statement, unless, of course, you were writing a legal brief for a client. Certainly there would be no shortage of lawyers eager to argue the opposite of your stance.

 

SF - Really interesting article, thanks for the link.

Frank - I'd love to know what harm comes to a paper by simply providing a link ... to that paper's site.

 

I'm sure there would be. And I'd be more than happy to engage them in that argument, at least as it applies to my own blog.

 

All links aren't created equal. If you have a blog devoted to a narrow topic and you link to newspaper sites every now and then, I don't see harm as this is incidental. However, if you are building a site into something that you clearly intend to become a primary, go-to site for news -- even a specialized topic -- and you are building it around content that belongs to others that you haven't paid for, then you are parasitically gaining a business advantage by rounding up the proprietary work of others to draw traffic to your site and reap banner-ad revenue.

 

Here's the story on Yahoo's partnership with newspapers:
http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/070416/yahoo_newspapers.html?.v=3

 

The latter example that you provide is known as a "splog" or "spam blog." And, believe it or not, it's not just traditional media sources that get ripped off. There have been numerous instances of sites being set up with content taken from full-text RSS feeds of sport-specific blogs and traditional media sites. For some reason, it was a pretty rampant problem for hockey bloggers a year or two ago.

However, I'd think the bigger problem would be content summaries and extensive block-quotes. Even if the site in question is an utterly worthless "splog," if all it provides is a permalink back to the content's address of origin, I don't see any real harm, as potential readers would have to access the actual content-provider's site to read the linked story/column, etc.

 

So a blockquote is being read on the radio by a host. He'll mention the paper and read three sentences.
You going to squash that, too?

 

Not to mention most local sportscasts ....

 

Yes, I will throw a zucchini at his head. The word is quash.

Three sentences is "fair use," according to law.