In breaking news, The Associated Press has apparently begun leaning on About.com authors to stop using quotations from AP articles to guide their readers to the complete text as it appears on other sites.
In a message sent to all contributors, an About.com moderator wrote:
\”I have some bad news to convey to everyone – AP and other news services
have decided to be quite strict in how they interpret their copyrights.
Before, it was always assumed to be OK if we just quoted a couple of
sentences from a news story and then provided a link – it was copying all or
most of a story which we had to avoid.
But not any more. Quoting even one sentence, if it conveys the gist of the entire story, isn\’t something that they want to permit now. They are serious about this. They have already been in contact with About over Guides who have done nothing more than quote the first couple of lines
on their sites, along with a link back to the full story.\”
About.com seems ready to knuckle-under D.M.C.A-style, and I can only imagine \’blogs will be the next target.
More information is available at Politech.
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