Copyrighting laws for dummies (me)

[fedr808]

So basically, I got into a fight with an admin on another forum. His opinion is that to copy and paste any information from another website (ie. CNN.com) is a copyright infraction even if you explicitly state where you got it from and give credit to said website.

Long story short, he decided to give me a 6 month ban because I posted information from another website (while giving credit to the authors), which is actually funny because I cited it from Wikipedia which as we all know has practically 0 original content and is more of a compilation of information.

That happened in February or so and up until now it hasn't really bothered me, but with nothing to do at the moment I decided to do some research on copyright law. Holy crap, there is an excessive amount of reading on it. In order to understand a simple statement I have to read multiple different links on different pages.

So I was wondering if someone could explain it to me as simply as possible.

Specifically the rights of people in the public domain to post information as well as the definition of "common knowledge" and whether you actually need to cite it at all.

Thanks.

 

[Bowser]

http://homepage.mac.com/prr/copyright.html

http://www.dpi.state.nc.us/copyright1.html

http://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/

http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl102.html



The above are what I found. It seems that educators fall into a special category, and there is some consideration concerning "Fair Use."

 

[Bowser]

Another one...

http://fairuse.stanford.edu/Copyright_and_Fair_Use_Overview/chapter9/9-b.html#1

 

[James R]

Material published online is protected by the same laws that apply to books, videos and music.

It is illegal to copy or republish material from any interent site without the express permission of the copyright owner.

Under the laws of many countries, limited quotation of material is permissible in the context of comment, review and/or criticism. This does not in general permit the reproduction in full of complete works (e.g. song lyrics or news articles).

Where you reproduce part of a work in a post, you must include a link to the original source, along with appropriate acknowledgement – at a minimum the author’s name and the name of the original publishing source, but consider also supplying the original date of publication and other relevant information (e.g. ‘US shares fall further’ by A.Writer, New York Times, 11 September 2015.)