Recently, there have been several lawsuits filed claiming copyright infringement against websites. Many of these lawsuits have been filed on behalf of newspapers against blogs, forums, and other online sites. The suits claim, among other things, that participants of the online site copied and pasted whole articles from the newspaper’s website in violation of copyright laws.

Although we have a long standing policy of not allowing copyrighted materials to be posted at BeechTalk, we have noticed a recent uptick in members copying and pasting news articles and/or uploading pictures and other materials to the BeechTalk servers that are owned by others and without permission.

It bears repeating that anything ‘published’ on the Internet, whether it is a story, news article, picture, postcard, photograph, art, etc., is almost invariably copyrighted by the author. In fact, copyrights vest in the creative work immediately once the work is memorialize in a tangible media, such as "online".

It should be noted that the creative work need NOT include a copyright notice. One should assume it is copyrighted unless it explicitly states otherwise.

At this time there is no way of telling the outcome of these lawsuits, but pundits have theorized that we should expect more of them as new agencies and other publishers stake out their online presence and associated revenue models.

In order to protect our members and BeechTalk from possible litigation, all members must abide by the following rules:

1. Copying and pasting entire articles from another site to BeechTalk is strictly prohibited. Instead, please post a link to the article and include, in your own words, a brief summary of the article AND its relevance to the discussion. Posts with merely a link without substantive text may be removed.

2. Do not upload to BeechTalk via the Attachment Feature any articles, pictures, or other copyrighted materials. It appears that based on recent caselaw (namely, Perfect 10, Inc. v. Amazon.com, Inc., 487 F.3d 701 (9th Cir. 2007)), inline linking to a photograph may be permitted. However, this is generally considered bad "netiquette" and should be minimized. One may, alternatively, simply post a clickable link to the photograph.

Unfortunately, we can't screen every post at BeechTalk, therefore we ask for your cooperation minimizing BeechTalk's and its members' liability.

Please review the materials above.

Thanks!

For those interested in How-To properly reference copyrighted material from other locations:

Images -
Option 1 -- Go to the webpage that displays the picture and copy the URL address (found in your browser navigation window), and paste the URL into your post. This will enable readers to click on the link and be taken to the picture at the source website.

Option 2 -- Go to the webpage that displays the picture and right click on the picture you want to share. In the right-click menu, select 'View Image Info' or 'Properties' (or a similar option in your particular browser) and note the URL address of the image. Highlight the URL address of the image and select Copy.

You can then post the URL address of the image in your post as just a link OR you can highlight the URL address of the image in your post with your mouse and then click the 'Img' button in the BeechTalk new post window. This will insert tags around the URL address and will embed the image as a displayed image in the thread.

Both of these options permit the copyright holder to maintain control of the copyrighted works and do not result in a copy of the image being duplicated here at BeechTalk.

Articles -
Go to the webpage that displays the article and copy the URL address (found in your browser navigation window), and paste the URL into your post. This will enable readers to click on the link and be taken to the article at the source website.