Copyright Law
How Much Excerpting is Too Much? ‘Scraping’ Suits May Hone Fair Use Rules
Posted Mar 4, 2009, 12:50 pm CST
By Martha Neil
It is considered a clear fair use of copyrighted material when bloggers excerpt a quotation and link to the online publication that initially printed it.
In fact, newspapers and other publishers often welcome such excerpts, since they draw additional attention to the original work. But now a growing number of bloggers are going much further and "scraping"—republishing large portions of material verbatim, sometimes without attributing the original source—and worried publishers are defending their turf more aggressively, reports the New York Times.
Copyright infringement suits against such Internet republishers apparently are up—the Berkman Center at Harvard Law School's Citizen Media Law Project followed three a year in 2004 and 2005, compared to 16 in 2007. And there presumably is also a sharp increase in cease-and-desist letters from original publishers, the first—and, often, only step toward litigation, since some recipients comply with the initial demand to stop scraping.
There is no bright-line rule about exactly how much copying is too much, the newspaper notes, and the statutory fair use standard hasn't yet caught up with the realities of the Internet, the newspaper writes.
"New modes of creation, reuse, mixing and mash-ups made possible by digital technologies and the Internet have made it even more clear that Congress’s attempt to define fair use is woefully inadequate," says David Ardia, who directs the Citizen Media Law Project.
If federal lawmakers don't act to revise the statutory fair-use standard, copyright litigation is likely to develop the specific rules that apply to Internet republication.
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