What process does SOTT go through to reprint articles?

yoyos

The Force is Strong With This One
tl;dr: How does SOTT reprint articles without copyright infringement worry?

I have a blog and want to do something similar to what SOTT does. I want to take news articles I find on the web and reprint them on my blog. It's hosted on Medium and has some neat features such as contextual note annotation, highlighting, and commenting. Wanted to try and see what would happen if I invited "the crowd" to annotate the articles that I reprinted on my blog.

I guess my main concern is that I'll be sued by the authors of the articles or by the news organizations they are writing for.
 
Can you provide a link to your blog?
 
Yes I can, but it's rather empty (2 posts) as I'm trying to figure out how to create, build, and ultimately materialize the vision I have. You can see what I have in mind with respect to my project on my website www.citizenscafe.com. There's a link to the blog on the site, but here's a direct link as well https://medium.com/real-social-post.

But this is where it gets a wee bit more complicated and more details are needed to fully explain, not sure if you are interested, so I'll keep it short. If you want the full story I'll be happy to lay it all out here. Just ask :)

The "Real Social Post" blog I linked above is hosted on Medium and they allow users to create 'Publications'...which is exactly what the "Real Social Post" is. I want to create another publication called "The People’s Investigation Feed" (which I've already actually created here: https://medium.com/the-people-s-investigation-feed), but as you can see that one is really empty (0 posts). That's the one I wanted to use for my idea of reprinting news articles and doing the annotation bit.

There's a lot more I could say about me and my idea and how I got to doing this, but not sure if that is of interest or relevant for you. If it helps you answer my question I'm certainly more than willing to share.
 
You might not be able to do what SOTT does as a registered non-profit.

See the about sott page here:

http://www.sott.net/page/1-About-Sott-net

Where you will read about sott's non-profit purpose:

The raison d'être for SOTT's fully reproduced non-original content collection is something that makes us a bit different. We notice that a lot of material disappears from the web, and we database full articles for a particular purpose: analyzing the "energetic flows". We have considered just databasing complete articles and making SOTT private, but as a non-profit organization, we are required to make the results of our work available to the public for free.

We have analysis systems that are tied to our database, and that is part of our scientific work - rather like counting photons that hit a detector. We are also working on an interactive history/current events timeline program as well as a mapping system. We would not be able to do any of that without the material we have in our database.

Thus, the reason for our inclusion of complete articles from other authors is rather specific, and is essential to make Sott.net what it is!

You can also read our Fair Use Notice here:

http://www.sott.net/page/10-FAIR-USE-NOTICE

Where you will read:

Pursuant to the U.S. Copyright Act as amended, the rights granted by copyright are limited by the doctrine of fair use as codified at 17 U.S. Code Section 107, including use for criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research, all of which are germane to the fair use by Sott.net.
 
Laura, thank you for your response. I did read the about sott page earlier and assumed that the non-profit status and clarification that the site is used as an experiment is what enabled the articles to be reprinted. The link to sott's fair use statement makes it that much more clearer and your response validates my assumption as well. Thank you for that! I really appreciate the quick response :)

I have a lot of thinking to do now as this whole legal realm of copyright is something I did not take into consideration when thinking about my idea.
 
If you use other people's work as a springboard to comment yourself, then I'm pretty sure you have fallen within the guidelines of fair rights and thus allowed to reproduce the material, but always link to the original article.
 
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