What’s the copyright on a blog post?

 Posted by on 29 June 2009  Modern Life
Jun 292009
 

Something that I didn’t think would be a brain-teaser: is a blog post copyrighted? Well, I would argue that it is. Would it be okay to excerpt part of someone else’s blog post? I should hope so, since I do it all the time.

But I doubt it would be okay to republish wholesale the full text of someone else’s work, even with attribution. It would at the very least make me uneasy. Maybe if there was extensive commentary and no way to clip just a portion of the work involved?

Now, here’s what happened in California: A girl graduates high school and goes away to college. Upon her return on holiday, she writes a MySpace blog post that describes how much she dislikes her family’s hometown. Her former high school principal discovers the posting, and hands a copy of it to the local paper’s editor, who runs it as a letter to the editor, attributing the girl, without her knowledge.

The fallout: the girl’s family has their house shot at, their business ruined, and they are forced out of town.

She sues the principal and the paper for copyright infringement.

What do you think the outcome should be?

There’s an extensive analysis and ensuing discussion over at Slashdot, plus on this blog, plus some news stories here and here.

Here’s the fallout so far: the girl’s copyright lawsuit has been thrown out, but it remains before the court whether the principal acted with malicious intent. The newspaper itself is protected underthe First Amendment, but the editor was fired, presumably for the serious breach of ethics involved.

Where would you draw the line?

Grant Hamilton

  • MPot

    Ethical breach, sure, but I don’t see grounds for a copyright lawsuit. Man, this is a tough one.

  • http://www.absurdintellectual.com/ Grant Hamilton

    Let’s say you write a lengthy, insightful comment here on Absurd Intellectual. I like it so much that I decide to copy it an post it to dozens of other websites, under your name. I can’t say that it for certain violates copyright, in a legal sense, but I think it should. The whole point of copyright, for good or for ill, is that the author of the work has control over how it is copied.

    The judge in this case has deciding that posting something on the open Internet is akin to giving up that control. If posting something on a corner of the Internet makes it theoretically visible to all, then the judge says it’s perfectly okay for the local paper (or the New York Times — or both of them, or everyone else) to publish that same content, so long as it’s attributed.

    I see both pros and cons in that decision. But it’s certainly more of a mind-bender than it initially appears.

  • MPot

    Yeah, I see what you’re saying (not that I have to worry, since lengthy insightful comments are not, ahem, my forte). But the trick is the assumption that blog posts and.or comments on such fall into the same category as, say, a newspaper article. They may be more like letters, public notes pasted on a communal bulletin board, or interoffice memos — all things that aren’t traditionally covered by copyright.

    Another possible complication: horribly capitalistic as it sounds, as I understand it, the purpose of copyright isn’t to give one control over how one’s words are used — it’s to ensure that one isn’t shut out of whatever money is made from those words. Unless there’s a possibility of financial loss, or someone else’s financial gain at one’s expense, a copyright claim strikes me as likely to fall flat.

    Not an easy nut to crack, certainly!