Reading notes, scrapbooking, social media reposting and copyright
How does Fediverse feel about copyright infringement running rampant on social media? Think quoting, linking to visuals, boosting, reposting, etc.
I am thinking about publishing my reading notes frmo the last year. It’s not a blog, rather a collection of excerpts and quotes I want to remember and refer to later on. The purpose is to build a pile of material from which I then synthesise. Because that’s how I work and thing - any many others too (see the boom of interest in Zettelkasten, note taking etc.).
I keep my notes privately and that’s OK. I also realised that there is an ingerent value in making them public. It forces me not to be too sloppy and get to the point. All is good.
Now, I am a smart guy too and I heard about this thing called copyright. And fair use. And right to quote policy. Etc.
The problem is this:
- extensive quoting, excerpting and annotating from 3rd party materials is a useful way to study and do research.
- private note taking like this is protected by copyright limitations in most (if not all) jurisdictions.
- making such notes public, can be quite useful for fellow souls on a similar research journey.
- publication of such a scrapbook, however, infringines on copyright of the original authors. One can argue about subtleties here, but copying whole paragraphs (which is useful!) clearly is a potential problem.
Which leaves me with several options:
- keep the notes private and thus make the world somewhat poorer (in eyes of the note-taker)
- perform a risk analysis and if the assessed actual risk is relatively low (such as e.g., a requirement to coply with a potential DMCA notice), go ahead and see what happens.
But it also leads to a bunch of interesting questions. Twitter, Facebook or Mastodon are full of quoting, reposting, boosting, linking to 3rd party images and videos, etc. All that, effectively constitutes copyright infringement. How do we feel about all that? Are there any useful reading sources on this?
Bah! My writing is indeed very sloppy this morning. I shall invest in better configuring (and listening to!) a spell checker in my editor.
@mathias Yeah. And I did not even touch upon the problem of jurisdiction (citizen of country A residing in country B quoting material authored by a citizen of country C residing in a country D and publishing the notes on a server in country E operated by an entity in country F - and whatever rehash of that).
Internet makes once simple legal matters infinitely interesting…
@FailForward I think part of the issue is: How are you planning to publish/share it? If you’re not planning to monetize it, that’s going to remove a lot of your issues, but not all.
How big are your “extensive quotes”? The other primary concern I would have is “Are you making a significant enough portion of the work available when it should be locked behind a paywall/purchase?” Because I know that’s usually illegal.
Some useful resources
@mathias