the personal-use provision prohibits reposting stories (as has been done here) online. In the future, if you want to excerpt a piece, or provide a summary (no LLMs, for the love of god), that’s fine, but whole articles are not something we do here for legal reasons. It’s irrelevant to the liability of Beehaw what your take on copyright is.
As for CW’s, if you want to be that verbose, mark the post NSFW and then list them at the top of the body.
Are these sitewide policies, or are they only applicable to the U.S. News comm?
Posting excerpts is OK. Posting entire articles, for example, is not OK. Providing archive links is OK as well.
Thanks for confirming. Please note that nearly everything I’ve posted here is likely in violation of this rule - I am not going to go report my individual Beehaw posts for removal due to copyright concerns, but I believe they were all made from @Trying2KnowMyself@lemmy.ml and primarily to the !science@beehaw.org comm if you would like to take action against them.
No worries. Please just comply moving forward. Thanks.
I’m gonna go ahead and take this opportunity to split some hairs because, hopefully it’ll save you having to answer the question in the future. But, at what point does an excerpt become too long? Where would the lawyers draw the line? Maybe 49.9%, something like that?
I looked up a primary source and it sounds like the actual law is extremely fuzzy, sort of flexible, and quite nebulous.
(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes; (2) the nature of the copyrighted work; (3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and (4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/107
I’m wondering if maybe the best guideline would be enough to hook the reader but not nearly enough to tell the story. Or maybe something along the lines of, enough to make you want to read the article, but short enough it doesn’t keep you from going to read the article, that it only tells a small portion of the story.
In the two minutes that I looked into this, I feel like I have opened a can of worms, and I feel like I should apologize, but it’s also something that might bear further definition in site guidelines.
I would never want to see my favorite beeple going to court. 💛
Fair use law is typically up to the judge. The four categories provide you a defense for fair use, but there’s no “hard line”. Unfortunately, “use common sense” is about as good as it gets, at least regarding the law.
I agree some kind of guideline would be helpful though. Not a hard line at all, but something to get a sense of where it becomes too much.
Edit: should clarify that I’m not a lawyer, but I’ve seen and read a fair bit of content regarding fair use in the past. It’s actually worth the time to research (if you’re in the US anyway) because you can see just how awful the cases would be if many of the copyright claims we see today were actually taken to court rather than just being big person bullying small person.
It should probably be obvious from the reply, but yeah, I should say, just to be absolutely clear, I am also not a lawyer.