Copyright question: Is it legal to read a newspaper or magazine

[Imperialism Inc.]

article on the radio, even if you(your company) are not the source of the original article?

I'm guessing not.

[eyesroll]

1. Probably not

...but you can excerpt, summarize and refer the reader to the original.

[Commendatori]

2. Doesn't Limbaugh do that all the time?

His "stack of stuff?" I'm only guessing, but if you quote the source, why wouldn't this be legal?

[Imperialism Inc.]

4. I'm not sure but when I was thinking about the case of an audio

book I started thinking that it was doubtful you could do a whole audio-book without the authors permission so it seemed like it would probably apply down to the newspaper level as well.

[kiahzero]

3. Depends

You could take it to court as Fair Use, but there's no clear precedent one way or another, as far as I can tell.

[Imperialism Inc.]

5. Reason I asked is I was thinking of starting

to do some Peer to Peer radio. Just reading top headlines and such.


http://www.peercast.org/
http://p2p-radio.sourceforge.net/

[bearfartinthewoods]

7. cspan does it every morning...just excerpts though n/t

[djg21]

6. Not in it's entirety.

You can make fair use of the article -- i.e., use excerpts for purposes of review, commentary, etc. You cannot republish the entire article.

[welshTerrier2]

8. www.commonDreams.org

if you look at websites like Common Dreams, you'll see examples of complete articles being reprinted from papers all over the world ...

do they have some kind of special arrangement with these papers ?? do they pay for the right to reprint the articles ??

it's unclear why they are able to do this and yet we can only quote limited portions of articles here on DU ...

does anybody know ??

[Imperialism Inc.]

9. True. And someone gave me a couple links yesterday to sites

producing articles in their entirety. Zmag.org was one.

[democracyindanger]

10. probably has contracts with syndication networks

DU does not. And even if DU did, I don't think random DU members could post anything they wanted.

[starroute]

11. Google "fair use" and get a feel for what's permissible

A lot of the court cases have turned on factors of financial gain and loss. If you are effectively making money off someone else's work, that's not fair use. If you quote so much, or quote such central passages, that the market for the original work is reduced, that's also a no-no.

For that reason, you should not attempt to read whole articles.

But just reading headlines and a few paragraphs for purposes of commentary and discussion of issues should be completely within fair use guidelines.