*dunno if this is possible but a bit more text in each post on what's to read when you follow the link (I doubt if this is possible since this is an automated process)
Actually this is what I do: When the feeds arrive at my desk they usually consist of one liners, I manually more than often amplify them to show the first paragraph or a teaser.
Copyright is an issue here, the line between fair use and infringment is a very thin one, so I tend to keep it on the safe side and not quote too much of the original article to keep the percentage of untransformed work low. It is all about balancing it out, I will see what I can do.
The guidelines I am following (I highlighted the relevant parts):
http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/fair-use-rule-copyright-material-30100.html :
Under the "fair use" rule of copyright law, an author may make limited use of another author's work without asking permission. Fair use is based on the belief that the public is entitled to freely use portions of copyrighted materials for purposes of commentary and criticism. The fair use privilege is perhaps the most significant limitation on a copyright owner's exclusive rights. If you write or publish, you need a basic understanding of what is and is not fair use.
Uses That Are Generally Fair Uses
Subject to some general limitations discussed later in this article, the following types of uses are usually deemed fair uses:
* Criticism and comment -- for example, quoting or excerpting a work in a review or criticism for purposes of illustration or comment.
* News reporting -- for example, summarizing an address or article, with brief quotations, in a news report.
* Research and scholarship -- for example, quoting a short passage in a scholarly, scientific, or technical work for illustration or clarification of the author's observations.
* Nonprofit educational uses -- for example, photocopying of limited portions of written works by teachers for classroom use.
* Parody -- that is, a work that ridicules another, usually well-known, work by imitating it in a comic way.
In most other situations, copying is not legally a fair use. Without an author's permission, such a use violates the author's copyright.
http://www.chillingeffects.org/fairuse/faq.cgi#QID824 :
Question: Can I copy an entire news article from a commercial news web site and post the article on my web site?
Answer: The fair use doctrine, as currently interpreted by the courts, probably would not entitle you to do so. Even though news items are factual and facts themselves are not protected by copyright, an entire news article itself is expression protected by copyright.
A court would apply the four factor fair use analysis to determine whether such a use is fair. In Los Angeles Times v. Free Republic, the court found that such a use was minimally -- or not at all -- transformative, since the article ultimately served the same purpose as the original copyrighted work. The initial posting of the article was a verbatim copy of the original with no added commentary or criticism and therefore did not transform the work at all. Although it is often a fair use to copy excerpts of a copyrighted work for the purpose of criticism or commentary, the copying may not exceed the extent necessary to serve that purpose. In this case, the court found that only a summary and not a complete verbatim copy of the work was necessary for the purpose of commentary and criticism.
The court also found that although the website solicited donations and advertised the services of another website, the overall nature of the website was non-commercial and benefited the public by promoting discussion of the issues presented in the articles on the website. However, the court found that the nontransformative character of the copying outweighed the consideration of its minimally commercial nature.
Finally, and most importantly, the court found that posting entire news articles on the website had an adverse market effect on the copyright owners.
See L.A. Times v. Free Republic, 2000 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 5669 (C.D. Cal. 2000)
Question: I found something interesting on someone else's blog. May I quote it?
Answer: Probably. Short quotations will usually be fair use, not copyright infringement. The Copyright Act says that "fair use...for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright." So if you are commenting on or criticizing an item someone else has posted, a court would likely find that you have a fair use right to quote. The law favors "transformative" uses ? commentary, either praise or criticism, is better than straight copying ? but courts have said that even putting a piece of an existing work into a new context (such as a thumbnail in an image search engine) counts as "transformative."http://groundwire.org/resources/articles/fair-use :
Groundwire offers nonprofit organizations the following recommendations on reposting copyrighted news articles:
* In most cases, we recommend that you avoid reposting news articles in their entirety on public websites
* Instead, we recommend that you summarize, quote, discuss and/or link to the original article
* Making copies of articles for an internal archive or other non-public-facing repository is probably pretty safe. It would be much easier to show that you're not harming the market for the original work
* Always check the website's Terms of Use and always err on the side of caution if you're unsure what it means
http://www.jccc.edu/policy_statements/copyright/guidelines.html :
Newspaper/magazine article
Fair use (permission not required)
* A complete work of less than 2,500 words
* For longer articles, excerpts of up to 1,000 words or 10 percent of the work, whichever is less (a minimum of 500 words)
* Articles covered in the previous two bullets may be expanded (e.g., the number of words increased) to permit the completion of an unfinished prose paragraph)
* Copyright notice and attribution included
Poll
