What is considered an excerpt?

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In this thread, Court-Martial for Murder,
I provided a link to an article from TIME magazine, and, since it was lengthy, and only a small part pertained to the discussion, quoted verbatim the pertinent segment.

Note: I did not alter the quoted material, I attributed it properly by including a link to the full text article, and I quoted a 144 word paragraph out of a 1460 word article (as determined by Word’s Word Count tool), just under 10%. I certainly felt this fell within most interpretations of fair use.

Chronos felt otherwise, and deleted the quote from my post. IMO, this was unnecessary and arbitrary, and since I doubt most readers will read through the entire article I cited, detracted considerably from the content of the post.

Is there some standard, either word count or % of the whole, which is considered acceptable? Is it just left up to the mods? That would seem to be an invitation to hihgly uneven enforcement of copyright (not copywrite, Chronos) protections. I like to provide useful links with posts when appropriate, but feel the usefullness of them is compromised if I can’t quote a small portion of the cited material.

Thanks for your assistance.

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Our usual process is to ask for cites to be as short and sweet as possible. And if they can be hyperlinks to the cite in its entirety, that’s even better.

Since you were thoughtful enough to provide a hyperlink, perhaps Chronos felt the cite was unnecessary.

We don’t have any hard and fast rule for percentages or anything similar, we just ask that our folks be considerate and succinct.

your humble TubaDiva
Administrator

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TEST.

[sub]Can you tell I’m really bored today?[/sub]

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Well, our enforcement is, of necessity, arbitrary to some degree (we’re only human, after all), but we try to be at least somewhat consistent. Your quote was one of the longest I’ve seen, and although it might be interpreted as fair use, it could also be interpreted as an infringement. Because of the stakes involved, were Time to complain, we have to err on the side of safety and take out anything we think might be a risk. This is especially true when our readers can get the same information in a form which defininitely acceptable, such as a hyperlink. I hope there’s no hard feelings because of this.