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?
