Ticomaya wrote:So what does "fair use" mean? Good question.
This is something I run into a lot,
fair use is a tough one.
On another site I run we invoke
fair use a lot. It's a purely academic site and we are collecting information that is not collected anywhere else to the degree we are doing so.
Critical to the usefullness of this information is media articles from many many years ago that are not preserved elsewhere online where we can link to.
But here it would be a tough legal sell. And the precedents out there are not too encouraging (e.g. see Free Republic's battle with the LA Times and Washington Post).
Online publishers rely on advertising to support the cost of their content, and while it's negligible amounts at a time each time someone reads an article copied elsewhere instead of on their site there is a direct relationship to financial loss.
So they pick fights about it and have won damages in the past. Smaller sites are under the radar and can usually get away with it, but legal teams are actively pursuing the larger ones.
