Spiders and Fair Use

[Outta Here]

Quote:

Fair Use

Many people talk about fair use as if that makes it okay to copy someone else's work. However, if someone takes you to court over a copyright issue, you have to admit to the infringement, and then claim it is "fair use". The judge then makes a decision based upon the arguments.

If you are doing a parody, commentary, or educational information you may be able to claim fair use. However, fair use is nearly always a short excerpt from an article and it is usually attributed to the source. Also, if your use of the excerpt harms the commercial value of the work (along the lines of if they read your article they won't need to read the original), then your claim of fair use may be nullified. In this sense, if you copy an image to your Web site this cannot be fair use, as there is no reason for your viewers to go to the owner's site to see the image.

For an interesting read on copyright infringement and the use of spiders on the web, please see: Copyright on the Web

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