DU Community Help

Under current U.S. law, there are mechanisms set up to protect both copyright holders and sites which allow users to post. When you consider a) how many copyright violations are produced every single second on the Internet and b) how many of them could arguably be tested in court as potential fair use cases, it quickly becomes clear that it would be impossible for copyright holders to chase down and prosecute every single violation. It is also impractical for owners of large sites and services to be held responsible for every single item that is posted by their users, and it becomes progressively more impractical the bigger a site gets.

So a compromise was written into the Digital Millennium Copyright Act all the way back in 1998. The DMCA provides site owners with "safe harbor" from being sued for copyright violations, provided that they act quickly to remove copyrighted content at the request of the copyright holder. This requires some hoops to be jumped through by both parties. Sites have to follow certain procedures to be eligible, and copyright holders have to submit takedown requests using an official procedure, which involves swearing under penalty of perjury that they are the actual copyright holder. (Many years ago, DU won a legal case which was related to these principles.)

In a nutshell: copyright holders need to have their rights protected, and so there is a legal way for them to quickly and easily ensure that their content is taken down if it is used without permission. Meanwhile, sites have an obligation to remove copyrighted material at the official request of the copyright holder, and if they do so, then they are protected from further legal action. Finally, users are ultimately responsible for the material they post, but it's generally understood that it is impractical to hold them to account. That's why you tend to only see lawsuits and criminal prosecutions against, say, massive illegal streaming services that broadcast movies or high-profile sporting events for free, as opposed to someone's granny who reposted a New York Times article on Facebook.

Therefore the copyright system on DU works like this: If we receive a legitimate DMCA request from a copyright holder, we will immediately remove the content at the link(s) they provide us with, and we will let the user who posted the content know that this action was taken. But when we're alerted to an alleged copyright violation through our internal system, it's not up to us to determine whether the post is legally a copyright violation or not -- the alert is really just a helpful tool to allow us to remind a user of our copyright policy, if we think it's necessary. If the post appears to significantly deviate from our four paragraph recommendation, we have an Admin function which allows us to send a boilerplate notice to the person who posted it, reminding them of our copyright policy, reminding them that users can be held responsible for copyright violations, and suggesting they edit the post down to four paragraphs. It is then up to the person receiving the notice to decide whether they want to comply or not. In the vast majority of cases, people edit their post.

However, we may not send a copyright notification in all cases where the user has exceeded four paragraphs. As mentioned above, there is also a "fair use" aspect to information that is posted on the Internet. Completely separately from the DMCA, there are different protections for excerpted content under fair use law, although the acceptable length of an excerpt is not specified. Therefore we recommend a fixed number of paragraphs when posting an excerpt because it's easy for everyone to remember and follow (as opposed to saying "you can post 5% of an article," for example). Four paragraphs is the number we decided upon, because we believe that in most cases it is both short enough to be considered a fair use excerpt, and long enough to get the gist of an article across.

But sometimes news articles are formatted with every sentence as a paragraph, and you can't get the gist of the article across without that fifth sentence. Sometimes an article is very long, and a six-paragraph excerpt is a smaller percentage of the article than a four-paragraph excerpt might be for a short article. There is no law that states that four paragraphs is the limit for an acceptable excerpt -- it's just an internal DU standard. So whenever we receive a copyright alert, we notify the user if it looks like they've gone too far and they could use a reminder about the policy.

I want to be clear here: This is not the Admin saying, "We don't care if you blow past the four paragraph limit." We want to respect the rights of copyright holders, and we believe that four paragraph excerpts are a fair way to do it. We do not want DUers to think it's okay to post however much of an article they feel like. If people repeatedly and egregiously violate the limit, they could get into trouble.

Essentially what we are trying to do is make sure that all DUers clearly understand that there is a limit -- that we are not giving legitimacy to the idea that it is okay to post entire articles or massive excerpts on DU. Most DUers respect our four-paragraph policy, and it does work to reduce overly-lengthy excerpts, which is good in that it both respects the rights of copyright holders, and also reduces the chance that we will receive DMCA takedown requests.