The Media Drop

On Wednesday, I had posted about the the announcement that Reuters would use FAST filtering technology to find sites that are stealing their work, and had expressed concern about its effects on bloggers. At the time, I had contacted Reuters through their website, and am happy to report that I received a response which everyone should be happy with.

I’m posting this without asking if I could post it, but did fully disclose what I use Reuters’ services for. So that shouldn’t be an issue.

Response (Webmaster (SP)) 26 03 2004 06:32 PM
Thanks for contacting Reuters. The purpose of the solution built with FAST technology is specifically to monitor Copyright violation. The tool has been designed to identify where a party goes beyond fair use of our stories - where they copy a full story and post it without license or they derive a story from our content without sourcing it.

Infringements of our copyright does not include where bloggers quote from and link back to our original story, or where sites display our headlines and link back to reuters.com. We are very comfortable with these practices.

Regards

Reuters Corporate Webmaster
www.reuters.com

Customer (Tom Biro) 25 03 2004 03:06 AM
Good day - today I read about Reuters plan to go after Internet sites which post Reuters data/writings without referring or without explicit permission (found here: http://p2pnet.net/story/1062 ). I understand that there is a subscription service that Reuters offers, but what about webloggers who post links to articles that have come from Reuters, either linking directly to you or to the newspaper/magazine sites they found it on?

I know for my site I’m generally giving credit where it’s due (newspaper authors, wire services, etc.) but know that isn’t the case for everyone. Do you see this being an issue?

Thanks,

Tom
tom@themediadrop.com

I think that sounds good to everyone, right? Credit goes where credit is due, and everyone’s happy. Glad we cleared that up!