Just wondering if the SDMB has any guidelines: is there an absolute word limit for quoting copyright material that triggers your concerns, regardless of the length of the source? or if the source is quite lengthy, can there be a longer quote from it than if the source is very short?
For instance, quoting 250 words from a news article that’s about 300 words long isn’t likely fair use; but quoting 250 words from a book that’s 200 pages long might be?
I am not a lawyer. In consequence, I am neither your lawyer nor SDMB’s. And, of course, this is not legal advice.
My reading of Fair Use? It’s fair use after you’ve been sued by a copyright holder and successfully defended the accusation with a Fair Use defense.
17 USC § 107 (Limitations on Exclusive Rights: Fair Use) does name some examples of criteria that would support judging that a alleged infringement should be decided as fair use, but it still has to be decided. Not pre-emptively, as far as I can tell; only after the fact in the challenge-and-response of our great adversarial legal system.
I think the following Wikipedia quote summarizes it well:
More practically speaking, I suspect it’s “how much copying can I get away with and defend in good faith?” Or, speculating from the SDMB perspective, “how much will this post get the Board in trouble?”
Of course, in the modern internet, I’d expect a DMCA takedown before a lawsuit. And I suspect the SDMB would jump on it, since the safe harbor provisions rely on that kind of snappy response.
yes, but it doesn’t answer the question. 5% from an article; what about from a book?
Those are good, conservative policies. It would take a raving mad-dog copyright holder to come after you if you toe that line.
ETA: I missed the issue of quoting a book. 5% may be a long post.
Also, de minimus defense has been shot down in the context of sampling music. Who knows what a defensible percentage will be for copyrighted books?
I think the last sentence covers that:
so you can’t quote from an old source that is still in copyright but not on the net?
We don’t have a specific word limit. We ask that people use the shortest quote they can reasonably use to get their point across and not use an overly large portion of the original work (or the entire thing).
Deleted
I think that what they are saying is that short quotes are o.k., but anything more should be a summary in your own words with a reference to the original text.
edited to add: Ninja’d by Da Admin.
I’m not a mod (like I’m not a lawyer), but it would appear your best recourse would be to paraphrase. But if you’re trying to quote for aesthetics rather than facts, you may be out of luck.
That’s because the answer is rather simple.
“Don’t get us into legal trouble. If we think what you did might get us into legal trouble, we will respond in a way that makes us reasonably sure that we have avoided that trouble. If that means you get banned, too bad for you. You have no other rights. Just look at the user agreement. It makes it quite clear. There are no other rules. The decisions of the staff are final.”
And quite frankly, that’s the attitude (and policy) I would have under similar circumstances. I can’t fault TPTB for that policy. The SDMB is not a public resource.