8

I bumped into an answer that quoted content from another site. The site in question has a copyright page that explicitly states:

All text on this site is copyrighted, and cannot be republished or otherwise used without explicit permission by the author.

Is quoting with attribution considered "fair use" even when the site's author explicitly forbids this as above?

The answer in question was deleted due to other problems it had, but had it been a great answer would I have been required to have the potentially infringing quote removed?

| improve this question | |
  • 7
    I think quoting with attribution (as long as it's not the whole text) is a form of fair use that overrides whatever you as the author define. Otherwise, any form of academic work would become impossible. IANAL though, and there may be differences between jurisdictions – Pekka Nov 24 '11 at 23:55
  • @Pekka It should also not be the main content of your own work. – Paŭlo Ebermann Nov 25 '11 at 3:15
6

The answer in question was deleted due to other problems it had, but had it been a great answer would I have been required to have the potentially infringing quote removed?

No. There's a well-defined process by which copyright owners can request the removal of infringing content - if necessary, such content will be removed, but by the site administrators.

Now, most of these sites have policies (enforced by moderators or any community-member with the ability to edit) against answers that consist wholly of content copied from another source - even if that source is licensed in such a way as to allow it (for instance, Stack Overflow itself). But that's a matter of community norms, not law.

See also: Dealing with posts plagiarising from copyrighted sources

| improve this answer | |

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .