Yeh, that’s different from what I thought you meant, all right.
I’d guess that the posting of links would be legal. Quoting part of the text? Hoo boy, you want to get into the details of the “Fair Use Doctrine”? That’s not a 25-words-or-less topic. I found this website, crated by a law firm, that has a full discussion of it in straightforward language you don’t need a law degree to decipher. There’s also an article in Wikipedia. And here is a very good discussion from a university’s point of view.
That’s the generality. That’s part of the legal considerations underlying why the SDMB wants posters to quote only segments of copyrighted material they link to rather than full texts, as I’m sure you know.
About how this all applies to snark sites? I defer to the mods/admins. My own take would be that if it stays on the snark site and doesn’t get used in any way to stir up trouble here then it would lie beyond the jurisdiction of TPTB, but that’s just a WAG based on what I’ve seen since I’ve been a member.
I don’t want to speak for anyone but this question seems to have gone unaddressed. What Miller is suggesting sounds an awful lot like “Well I don’t like people who run X type of site, and frankly they should be punished on these boards if it’s discovered”. Now I’ve no problem with banning/warning someone who constantly brags about their offsite snark board/site on these boards, but we have to be careful about jumping the gun.
Hell, I could be Fred Phelps* but that shouldn’t be ground for my banning unless I act like Fred Phelps on the board. Perhaps Miller meant that and it just came out wrong, but I wouldn’t want to see this board go down the route where our offboard activities were fair game for on board sanctions. No matter how distasteful the offboard activities are.
As one of the mods said earlier, they don’t go looking for this sort of thing. In the case of Carnalk, he linked to his own snark site in a thread. His actions on this board showed that his snarkery was pretty much all he had to offer as a poster, so he was suspended. It wasn’t because of his offboard activities. It was because of his onboard activities.
Earlier in this thread, I saw a post from some I felt like pitting a while ago. A little while ago, my ip number look-up freaked out, and I could not access this board, so I looked up some related sites. One was an Anon board, with a thread about who you would like to see pitted more often. That person mentioned me. (Or someone claiming to be them, at least. I was considering pitting them, based on their behavior here, and mentioning the post in passing, without posting the link, but now that I have read this post, I have reconsidered. Thanks.
Actually, I think they should be punished in real life. Drag them from their beds with half-crazed dogs at midnight, and give them savage beatings in the streets, sez I!
No, seriously, I meant I don’t have a problem banning them when their nasty little snark sites start impinging on the SDMB. Bragging about their sites like CarnalK did, or starting pit threads based on information gleaned from them, like the whole Kaitlyn/Number 6 debacle, etc. As distasteful as I find these people, they shouldn’t be punished on the boards for things that happen off the boards, until those off-board activities start interfering with the SDMB.