We are aware that some other Internet forums (or their members) demand that news articles be reproduced in their entirety when posts about them are made. Doing this, even if you identify the source and author and/or provide a link to the original article, is a violation of copyright law. It has come to our attention that a well-respected American RKBA site has just been sued for such activity, and has been effectively shut down until the case can be resolved in court ... which may take years.

For this reason, in order to protect this site we have added a new rule that more explicitly addresses (and prohibits) copyright violations. We are calling this to your attention because anything with the potential to shut down this site MUST be viewed seriously. We hope that none of our members would knowingly and intentionally engage in unlawful activity. However, because the practice of quoting entire news articles is so widespread on other forums, you may not understand that doing so is illegal if you don't have the owner's permission. Please note, we have never approved of violations of copyright law and we have never asked our members to reproduce the entire body of news (or other) articles.

Please take a moment to jump to the Forum Rules and review the new rule. If it sounds serious, it IS serious, because of the severity of the potential consequences. Although the owner of this site lives in Greece, our servers and web hosting company are in the United States, which means that a court action COULD shut down this forum.

We encourage the posting of a BRIEF introduction or explanation along with a link to any news article, but we are not intellectual property attorneys and thus we cannot determine what is "Fair Use" and what is illegally quoting too much. In deciding whether too much of an article has been quoted, staff members will have to use their best judgment, guided by their understanding of the fairness doctrine, in evaluating posts, and because a violation can be so serious, they are likely to be conservative. The best rule, obviously, is to assume that "Less is more," and quote only the very smallest excerpt that will convey the idea of the article.

If you have any questions, please contact the moderating staff. Thank you.

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John Caradimas
M1911.ORG

I just read this and will read the new rule.
When I went to school we were taught to provide the source of our information as well as the publisher and copyright. I usually do this, but some people are not aware of this. Even a brief quote should be acknowledged with a source; author, publication etc. An excerpt should have all of the pertinent copyright data or a footnote with it.
I'm no scholar or lawyer. This is one of the reasons that I post a link, and then let someone go there, because if I went there so can they.

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KEN
www.m1911.org
www.flaguns.com
Amendment II: A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

In general, it appears that members of THIS forum are quite well-behaved in this regard, and IMHO deserve credit for so being. On some other "gun" boards, people who have done it right have been severely taken to task by other members for not copying and posting the entire article. If anyone had the temerity to mention "copyright," they were booed, hissed, and otherwise made to feel like sub-human beings. "I don't have time to click links," is a typical response, "If the article isn't in the post, I'm not going to read it."

That all came to a screeching halt this past week, when a web site belonging to Clayton Cramer (a well-known RKBA advocate and Constitutional historian) was sued by a newspaper publisher for having copied and posted entire articles on the site. Suddenly people on the "gun" boards are having an epiphany (of sorts).