Sharing of Articles and Copyright

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tiyerl

New Member
I have a forum and some of the posters post articles from other websites that are on-topic for the forum we run. The members who post them always posts a link to the article source and they sometimes either post the full article or sometimes a few paragraphs. What i ask is it legal to post other peoples articles on a forum without there permission? And can anyone who admins or mods a forum give me some advice on this issue and what they do to deal with it. Thanks
 

bjd461

New Member
It works like this, as far as I know.*

Articles can usually be copied (syndicated) as long as you obey the rules, or terms, from the article directory or source.

Most of the time, these rules say that you may only take the full article including any resource box or bio box, and preserve any links contained in the article.

For example,if it is an article in EzineArticles, it reads like this - "You have permission to publish this article electronically or in print, free of charge, as long as you leave the article title, author name, body and resource box intact (means NO changes) with the links made active and you agree to our posted publisher terms of service."

As for posting a few paragraphs, the answer there is usually no, it is not permitted.

Hope this helps
 

MOH

New Member
In general, no.

If they're being sourced from something like EzineArticles, and they're obeying the specified conditions, that's one thing.

But if they're just taking articles/blog posts from various websites that haven't explicitly given permission, then it's just content theft.
 
If they are simply posting the articles from their own site, then that should be alright from a legal perspective. However, if the person is posting an entire article, not just an excerpt there could be issues, even if posting a source link.

From another point of view, you might want to restrict posting of article excerpts as it takes members off your site and sends them to a competitor's site.
 

jeffscott

Member
I would not recommend posting other articles within the forum site instead i will make a thread that is all i have learned from the content to make discussions.
 
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