I’m going to have the illustrious job of managing my company’s website, which involves us posting various news stories from around our industry. I’ve managed company blogs in the past, which always involved finding a news story online and writing about it, but they’ve always been on an actual blog, and never posted as stories themselves.
A co-worker of mine says that it’s illegal to write a news story based off another newstory because it’s copyright infringement, but I don’t know if that’s true.
Example: Let’s say I find a story from the Newark ABC affiliate that says “Local College Pioneers a New Tech Thingy”. The story is about how a local college uses a new tech thingy to help research heart disease. I know I can’t copy and paste the story and throw it on the site as our own, but what’s the legality of writing a story called “New Jersey College Finds High-Tech Way to Fight Heart Disease” and talk about what they’re doing based on that ABC article?
You can’t copyright facts, so the fact the college is using this technology can’t be copyrighted, and the way of telling the story will use the same facts as the ABC article, but not the exact words…is it copyright infringement?
With no journalistic knowledge at all, I don’t see why you couldn’t do that. I want to say you could give them credit at the end, but you also run the risk of getting their attention and not everyone is going to be happy about that.
However, isn’t that what most news sites do? One news site pops up with breaking news and it suddenly propagates across the internet. Watch what happens when a celebrity dies. Within minutes every major news site will have an article that starts out with “According to TMZ…”.
ETA, here’s the article from John Heard’s death in my local news stations website. The first line is “The actor best known as the dad from the “Home Alone” movies has died, TMZ reports”.
Of course, I have no idea if they pay for that, but it certainly gets done on a regular basis.
IANAL As long as you’ve properly cited or attributed the source of your facts and didn’t directly plagiarize anything, there’s no reason you can’t.
Sports journalists do it every single day. As far as I can tell, many national sports journalists don’t do anything else; just reading through local papers then repackaging the stories for CBS Sports or ESPN.
Distinguish between “it is illegal…” i.e. against criminal law, versus you are violating copyright and could get sued (civil lawsuit). It isn’t illegal.
There are probably a dozen nuanced answers to the copyright issue. You obviously can’t lift the story wholesale, word for word. Whether a re-write is copyright violation - depends how different it is from the original. Facts cannot be copyright, but the expression of them can. Volume matters.
A lot of stories will say something like “According to the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta…” or some such. Then you go and verify the situation by checking the press release on their website. It’s not copying if you have multiple sources, and it’s not copyright violation if they put out a news release, and in the story you write, in some parts you quote (and attribute) pieces that are verbatim and intended for public release.
But if it gets to court, and it simply looks like all you did was re-write what was on the front page of X’s site, every day, over and over - they might have a case.
Actually in the case you cited the most likely situation is that the college or the manufacturer/distributor of the new techy thing issued a press release which the local newspaper either copied verbatim or made very minor changes. Nobody objects if you copy a press release and there is no need for you to cite the source either–they want their press releases to be distributed.
This is about 80% of the current news updates currently being done. However, there are more news stories that aren’t press releases that are applicable to what we do than there are news releases.
This legality issue has come up multiple times from a co-worker and I’m doing what I can to see if she’s actually right.
I wouldn’t go too far down that route. While the author of the news release won’t object to it being used verbatim, once that local newspaper starts making changes to it and adds their own details, that version of the story is to some extent theirs.
The easiest way to deal with this online is simply to write a headline like “New Jersey College Finds High-Tech Way to Fight Heart Disease,” then add a summary like, “Acme’s new Whizbang 9000 clears out clogged arteries,” then simply link to the original article. Everyone gets the credit that’s due them and no one gets accused of plagiarizing.
Copyright law includes criminal acts and criminal penalties in the U.S. That’s not even the issue. Not everything illegal is criminal, and some things are civil infractions, but violations of copyright law can be illegal.
It certainly can be copying even if you’re copying from multiple sources.
Unless you are copying expression, they do not have a case, even if you do it 100 times.
Sir T-Cups has it right. Your OP shows you know what to do and not to do. Copyright is not a worry here.
You can proceed like this, but it’s entirely unnecessary and usually a terrible way to operate. People want to read the article inside their newsletter. Why bother publishing it otherwise? People do not click on links, and I say that because we’ve had 10,000 threads in GQ alone where people manifestly do not bother to click on links even when they would provided needed information.
“Details” are facts and facts cannot be copyrighted. It does not matter how many hands the story goes through and how much has been accreted. An original expression of those facts is fine and accepted practice.
Sir T-Cups’ coworker is wrong on the facts and should be ignored. Or sent out to learn. But at no time should Sir T-Cups change his actions based on ignorant fears.
I understand the reporting model of the most major news sites is no longer to maintain reporters on the beat, eating their heads off, or ace investigative teams working around the clock; but substituting the New Model of having a large news desk ---- no longer with wisecracking editors in fedoras and feisty young gal reporters braving local dignitaries — but whose denizens scour Facebook and watch TV news for the next big break.
IANAL and what I am reporting was for Canada. A lawyer was speaking on radio and he claimed that all those announcements on every sports broadcast that say something like “The description and accounts of this game are the property of the team and league (substitute actual names here) and may not be reproduced without permission, etc., etc.” are nonsense and you can record and retransmit to your heart’s content with two exceptions. Canned interviews and fixed events (think pro wrestling). But the spontaneous descriptions of the announcers are news and cannot be copyrighted. I would really like to hear from an intellectual property lawyer on this.
Notice that this applies to real time reporting of news. Once it has been edited and so on, I guess it becomes more like a canned interview.
Since this is your (new) job, I’d guess your concerns also include credibility and overall professionalism. Citing your sources contributes to both, doesn’t it?
I mean, if Company X says that College Y pioneered Technology Z, I wouldn’t give a fuck, because right now I’m being told that alkaline water cures cancer.
The story becomes slightly more interesting if a semi-reputable news outlet reported the story (and I can verify that via hyperlink).
Even more interesting if your writeup synthesizes information from several semi-reputable sources.
Someday local dignitaries are going to be very happy when someone tells them they no longer have press around to badger them with questions. But it’s not today.
Yes, but including the hyperlink to the article would give people the opportunity to click it. The intention is to keep them on OUR website by talking about the breaking news, then providing links to supplemental articles within our own domain.
This sort of thing is done all the time. I don’t mean press releases. I mean articles that deliberately see a news report in one publication and write about it. They very often even explicitly link to the original article.
It is indeed impossible to copyright a fact, just a particular expression of it.
There is a difference between news agency (your term) and news site (Even Drake’s term). News agencies are organizations like the Associated Press; news sites are sites like the Huffington Post or Drudge Report.