Forum announcement: posting articles

[Ellsworth]

We're going to have to ask that people not re-post large sections of content from other websites on our forum. That would include re-posting: news articles, journal articles, magazine articles, blog posts, information from commercial websites, et cetera.

This change has become necessary because a company called Righthaven has recently started suing forums owners, individual forum posters, and bloggers over re-posted content.

This is primarily an issue when entire articles were re-posted, or large sections from entire articles. Quoting one or two sentences from a long article should still be fine, since it would fall under "fair use." Quoting one or two sentences from a short article would not be ok, since they would constitute a majority of the work.

So if you find something cool on the web you want to share, just write a few sentences describing what the article is about, in your own words. Then include a link to the article in your post.

We appreciate your understanding about this unavoidable policy change.