Rule on Content Attribution/Copyright Infringement

[DannyInvincible]

Just starting a thread, as advised by tets, to discuss some issues I've been having with posts of mine being edited or deleted due to alleged breaches on my part of the forum rule relating to content attribution/copyright infringement.

I had made the following post in the player eligibility rules thread after having a post edited (with warning included) and would be happy to receive some conclusive or definitive clarification on the relevant rule if possible:

Hmm, the forum rule on content attribution states:

"To protect both yourself and Foot.ie from copyright infringement liability, please do not quote entire articles on the site, just an extract (a few paragraphs); and please provide the source of the article, plus a link to the original. Posts in breach of this rule will be edited and/or deleted."

Having been recently warned to quote small portions of articles when I quote something in future, I was intentionally very selective in what I quoted above and didn't quote anything remotely near the entirety of the Independent's article about Zaha. I quoted a number of paragraphs from different parts of the article that I thought were particularly relevant to earlier discussions on eligibility and association switches. For future reference and the sake of clarity, what exactly is constituted by "an extract" or how many paragraphs exactly is "a few"?

Tets replied with the following post:

I posted a guideline for you a few days ago

"Danny, as a rule of thumb, if you're quoting more than a paragraph, then the link is enough"

If you want to discuss it further, start a thread in the support forum. It's nothing to do with eligibility

However, the above "rule of thumb" doesn't correspond with the actual forum rule on content attribution (quoted in my post above), nor is it being applied consistently. It seems the "rule of thumb" is being enforced selectively. In fact, it hasn't even been applied consistently within the thread-page of my apparently-offending post. So, as I queried in the quoted post above, what exactly is meant by "an extract" and how many paragraphs is "a few"?

I also had a post deleted from the James McCarthy thread and was confused as to why this was, as I explained:

Erm, tets, in that post of mine that you've deleted, I quoted Ronald Koeman's spoken words from a public press conference, all ten minutes of which could be viewed via the YouTube video that I also posted. Of which forum rule was that in breach?

Some clarification on which rule I had breached in that instance also would be appreciated.

Thanks.

[Eminence Grise]

DI, 'fair usage' is a hard to define term in copyright. What amount constitutes fair is not defined: 50 words from a novel could have a different weighting to 20 words from a song lyric, for instance, even if both were used in, say, a review. I have an academic book that’s in pre-print and I needed to get written permissions for any aggregated quotes from sources of over 100 words (two of my main sources were the Indo and Irish Times). I wasn’t charged for these and other printed sources (I was for photographs by the National Library) as it’s a small print-run and won’t make me any money, despite an eye-watering cover price! But this site is commercial rather than educational, and permissions or fees could be expected for excessive direct quoting.

Maybe a simpler rule of thumb is that a link and summary is a greater courtesy to everybody else than scrolling through acres of pages, and your quoted posts have gotten very long lately. I'm not having a pop at you, you're usually one of the more considered posters here, but others have posted equally overlong quotes recently.

[DannyInvincible]

I hear what you're saying, EG.

I wasn't being malicious or intentionally disruptive in quoting articles at length. I'm not saying you're accusing me of that, but I'm just clarifying or explaining my "habit"/tendency a bit further. I guess, having read an interesting article or whatever, I often try to quote what I feel is relevant to a particular thread or what I think people might be interested in reading and (maybe misguidedly) thought the greater courtesy would have been posting the relevant info on the forum for people to read rather than having to seek out the relevant bits in a link. Personally, I find if I have a bit of a preview of a certain article, I'd be more inclined to click on the link than if there's just a sentence/title and a link provided, but maybe that's just me. I appreciate the concerns over copyright infringement, but it is all rather ambiguous and clearly difficult to apply the rule consistently.

I'll try post a summary in my own words with my links in future with a paragraph or two/three at most, although I'm still puzzled as to why my post in the McCarthy thread was deleted. Was there a potential copyright infringement there? The post was more or less the same as the post below, except for the fact that I also quoted Koeman's words (and they were only his words) on McCarthy. The words were also quoted in the RTÉ article, but as they were spoken words from a public press conference, a video of which was also supplied, I didn't anticipate there'd be a copyright issue.

Here's what Koeman said during the pre-Merseyside derby press conference earlier today that provoked O'Neill into making his scathing "master tactician of the blame game" statement this evening: http://www.rte.ie/sport/soccer/2017/...ronald-koeman/

Or see from 1m35s:

[dahamsta]

I don't want any more than a paragraph or two quoted from external sites. People can click links.

[DannyInvincible]

I don't want any more than a paragraph or two quoted from external sites. People can click links.

Grand; would it be worth amending the rules page to conform with that?

And was there a copyright issue with my deleted post on Koeman/O'Neill/McCarthy?

[tetsujin1979]

There was no copyright issue with it, you'd ignored repeated warnings to limit quotes to a paragraph or two, so I deleted it.

[DannyInvincible]

But what's the fundamental problem with, say, quoting a section of speech from a public press conference if it doesn't amount to copyright infringement? It just seems like a pointless rule otherwise. What if I was quoting a speech that had been originally or exclusively transcribed by myself and had not been published elsewhere? Or what about this post, for example, where I've quoted lengthy email exchanges between myself and sports law expert Yann Hafner (with his express permission) for the purpose of informing other forum users on the interpretation of FIFA's eligibility rules: http://foot.ie/threads/147164-Eligib...=1#post1805275

Was that in breach of a forum rule? I hadn't really thought that sort of quoting at length would be a problem and assumed your request for no more than one or two paragraphs related to published articles.

Isn't preventing potential copyright infringement the reason for the rule in the first place? Maybe I've misunderstood its purpose, although dahamsta told me that the issue with my admittedly-lengthy quoting of articles was effective copyright infringement when he PMed me about it. If it's a potential copyright problem, that makes sense to me - I can appreciate that no problem and I'll endeavour to adhere to the rules and dahamsta's wishes in future - but I don't really get why there'd be an outright ban on otherwise placing more than a paragraph or two of something inside quote tags that doesn't even amount to a copyright infringement.

[dahamsta]

Copyright infringement is the primary reason, because the majority of people that post articles are posting copyrighted materiel, and it's a risk to the site. There is also the issue of monetisation, in that many sites are ad-supported, and taking the link from them is taking potential ad clicks, and potential revenue. And there is the issue of tidiness -- if it's on another site, leave it there, and link it. That's the heart and soul of the web. And I was done with this two posts ago, for the love of god find something of value to do with your time.

[DannyInvincible]

Heh, I think that clarifies it. Thanks for that, and the life advice.