Website Copying

[jdickson]

We have a client we are developing a website for who's main focus is to republish articles that are written in newspapers, magazines, etc. They will post the entire article inside their web site and sell advertisments within these pages. They are including an URL back to the original content within the story either at the top or bottom of page. Is everything legal here with the link back to the original content? Is selling ads off someone else's content legal? Thanks in advance for any advice!

[felgall]

What the requirements are for publishing copies of someone else's content will depend on the requirements that they specify when they give the permission to make the copy. No permission from the copyright holder means that the content would be considered stolen and the copyright holder can get the hosting provider to shut the entire hosting down.

If you have permission from the owner of the content to display a copy on your site with ads then you can do it.

You should get all permission in writing to avoid any later disputes over whetehr such permission was actually given.

[jdickson]

Thanks for the feedback. It looks like our client might be getting verbal permission from the actual person who wrote the article, but not permission from the company that writer works for. I'm assuming our client would need to get the permission of the company (NY Times, other regional city newspapers) and not only permission of the writer since the writer is an employee of the newspaper.

[tracknut]

Yep, and even if the writer was an independent, it is not unusual at all for writing to have an exclusive agreement like "for 1 year from the date of first publish in our magazine, this article cannot be published elsewhere". I run into those agreements with publishing photographs all the time.

Dave

[felgall]

My contract with NYT for material I publish on their about.com web site is that they get exclusive online rights and 50% of any income from any offline use. That means that even though I wrote the articles I don't have the right to give anyone else permission to display the article online (and neither do they). I can arrange offline use and so can they but in each case we need to let the other party know so as to make sure that they get their 50%.

The contract that any particular independent writer/photographer might have with any newspaper may have different criteria that mine for online/offline use but in each case they'd need to abide by any existing contracts that they have regarding the use of the material in any permission they might be able to grant for your use. Even so you'd definitely need it in writing. If they gave you permission to use it after already granting the newspaper exclusive rights and the newspaper took action against you for copying something for which they held exclusive rights then the written copy of the permission would at least allow you to claim damages against the person who gave you the permissionin the first place whereas if it were verbal then they just have to deny ever having said it and could claim that what they really said was that they would have given you permission had they the right to do so.

[Fang]

http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/01/27/0244238