My Dad sent me an email that had an entire article embedded in the body of the text. Its a well done piece on understanding the oil spill in the Gulf, and I wanted to put it into the BP thread in the Pit.
Unfortunately, he didn’t provide me a link. No problem, I found the article online, but…its a subscription website and I don’t really want to pay for access and that probably wouldn’t work for everyone else to see it. Obviously I cannot copy and paste the entire article into the BP thread because that’s against SDMB rules.
Is there some way to host it somewhere online, copy and past it into some other kind of document and then link to it that way?
That still violates the copyright, so it doesn’t really help you. If the author has decided not to make it available via free linking, you shouldn’t copy your own version.
That’s what I was afraid of. I checked the webpage again, it may not be a paid subscription but something you just need to sign up for. I’m not particularly fond of doing that either, not just to try to post a link from one website to another.
I suppose I initially figured that since my Dad had somehow emailed it to me in its entirety that it was public information. Or something.
The fact that your dad emailed it to you means that he knows how to copy and paste. It has no bearing on the copyright of the piece. Some media sites have links to email stories to people you know; if that’s what your dad did, it’s still copyrighted material that you don’t have a right to republish on another site without permission.
I am not going to attempt to post a link to this article I mentioned due to reasons stated, but for the sake of my OP, in general, is there a way to do what I’m asking?
I’ve been sent stuff via email that I thought was interesting but it was a cut and paste job on the part of the sender. If I ever want to share something like that (legally, of course) and I can’t find a link to it elsewhere online (my Dad often sends me obscure declassified military ops stuff that isn’t easily Google-able, for instance), how would one go about doing that?
Would you screenshot it, host it on a site like photobucket and post that link? Obviously I can’t link to my email account.
You need webspace. You probably have some. You then upload the file to your webspace (using something like FTP), and then send people the link. It’s not really all that difficult.
There are also free file sharing sites, like Rapidshare, but they’re probably not the best choice for a small article.
I’m not sure why you’d want to share a screenshot if you can just copy and paste. In addition to being much larger than the text version, a graphical version of the page is immeasurably less convenient and less accessible.
If you used FTP you’d need a place to put it, which means you’d need web space. Your ISP may or may not have given you free web space.
But, Google Docs is free and you can share the link with anyone. Right now in my Google Docs account is this pdf that someone linked to from the SDMB (I don’t think they posted it to Docs themselves tho).
I don’t see why you couldn’t just copy and paste it into the forum itself. If you absolutely wanted to make a separate site for it (copyright issues notwithstanding), you can choose between:
Sharing a document (similar to a Word doc):
Google Docs, mentioned above, is what I’d normally recommend
A domain name isn’t required unless you want one. Without one, your page would just show up as somearticle.googlepages.com, for example.
Do this often enough and you might as well just start a blog.
ETA: Nevermind, I just read why you couldn’t post it in the forum (not allowed). In that case, your issue is a legal one, not a technical one. Unless you can find a legitimate Fair Use exception for it, you’d be violating copyright no matter how or where you host it.