Prepare to be legally concerned if you blog about and/or link to online copyrighted material. A group of Colorado newspaper publishers (including Media News Group, which owns the Denver Post and also the Salt Lake Tribune in Utah) have hired legal help to prevent the use of copyrighted stories. An online blog receiving a Cease and Desist letter was ColoradoPols.com. It probably doesn't help that the blog has this top banner ad:
Read all about it here, and advise yourself, your management team or your client about this action. Revisit your Web sites and blogs. Past or even current verbal permission from a news outlet may not protect you.
Use care when you link to news stories. An argument can be made that if you cut and paste a portion of the article, then link to it, you have given the story away and thus create no need for the reader to visit the newspaper's site. Given the financial health of news publications today, this may be an escalating trend.
There's a good copyright attorney in Salt Lake. I'll see if I can get him to weigh in on the matter. Stay tuned.
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