Maria is asking how long a quotation can be before it becomes content theft. This might be a good time to review some Fair Use Doctrine. Fair Use basically means that you can use other people’s copyrighted work for the purpose of news reporting or review as long as you’re not devaluing the original conent.

This complete ripping off of the New York Times on Dance Theater Workshop’s blog is probably not covered by Fair Use since they are devaluing the content on the New York Times site. The NYT was going to make money off of advertising when people read that content on their site. Now they aren’t going to get that revenue. That’s stealing. (This it probably a better example of how DTW posts reviews without stealing…)

Taking a few lines and providing a link to the full story is probably a good thing for the original content since it encourages people to read it in the original form.

Embedding a video is kind of a mute point since you’re not actually making a copy when you embed something. You’re actually just displaying a part of another web page on your page. You’re just showing something that already exists somewhere else.

(And like Marc, we’re not lawyers.)