Four legal questions for copy-paste blogs

Cut-and-paste blogs result in copyright violations

E-Commerce Times carries an interesting article on Copy Cat Bloggers written by John P. Mello Jr.

Thomas Smart, who is co-chair of the intellectual property and patent litigation group at Kaye Scholer, explained that the courts ask four questions to determine if someone is making fair use of copyrighted material:

What is the nature or purpose of the use? “Commentary or adding your ideas to someone else’s ideas or literary criticism are more favored than just copying for purposes of passing it on to someone or reselling it,” he said.

What is the nature of the work being copied? “A work of fiction is entitled to more protection than the daily weather chart in the newspaper,” he explained. “The higher the degree of creativity in a work, the more entitled it is to protection.”

How much of the work was copied? “If you take an entire article from The Wall Street Journal or Newsweek and recapitulate the whole thing, that’s more problematic than if you take a couple of quotes from it,” he observed.

How did the copying affect the market for the copyrighted work?

"Bloggers, because they probably don’t have legal counsel and often operate on their own, are more likely to copy more than probably is permitted," Thomas Smart, who is co-chair of the intellectual property and patent litigation group at Kaye Scholer in New York City, said.