Fair use, blogging questions

[shindig]

I made a little html/php/javascript web form that has the following fields:

• URL to scrape
• Title for new webpage
• Summary Description (hand written summary of article)

So I go down Google Trends, and grab some URL's of popular stories.

I write a title for the page.

I write a little description about the article.

My script automatically scrapes out the information and images from the URL's articles, then populates an html page with my navigation, my Title, my description, and the scraped information below my description in another div.

Here's a simple example of the prototype back when chick fila was in the news,


Obviously it should be polished up, some CSS added, etc, but I was just working on the functionality. If my description summarizes/discusses the article that was scraped, is that considered fair use? Would I benefit from search engines with all the "trending" keywords in the article?

Should I not scrape the entire article? Should I break it up and have a couple descriptive divs of my own "fair use" writing throughout the scraped article?

Is this illegal?

 

[InTh3Moment]

I might not be fully understanding what you're doing, but this seems very similar to content curation, which is totally legal and legitimate. Content curation does not even require you to have descriptions throughout the content, you can simply put an intro and conclusion at the end of the content.

 

[shindig]

Yeah as much as I read it seems to fall under "commentary". Basically I just take the URL from the article I want to copy, write a commentary about it, add some tags, and hit run and it scrapes the article and images from the URL and makes a new html page on my server with the content from the article and my commentary.

 

[deadzed]

I think the only thing you really need to worry about is the image. It's been hammered out in the court system that fair-use for images, in the manner that you are using them, stops at a thumbnail of the image.

 

[shindig]

I think the only thing you really need to worry about is the image. It's been hammered out in the court system that fair-use for images, in the manner that you are using them, stops at a thumbnail of the image.

Good to know. I could probably resize it easily with php now that I know...

 

[EricP]

Are you siting the source with the article and image?