a sign of respect, fair use is back in the news © illustration by minh uong/the new york times (thank you james for letting us know)

the new york times reported that publishers are unhappy with the use of excerpts of their content. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/02/business/media/02scrape.html?_r=2&pagewanted=1

designboom recently took part in an international survey and answered the following questions: — what is your opinion? actually, we also don’t like it too much when other websites use ALL of our images (whether owned by designboom or not) in their articles. for us traveling, photographing, or just researching photo material is fun, but also work that involves labour, energy and a certain budget. from our point of view, seeing the entire material entirely transferred to other sites with just a credit   – VIA DESIGNBOOM – is not perceived so well. — why do you think you are penalized? while we are charmed by the fact that the contributors of these other sites like what we do, we feel our work is exploited. networking, it happens then that other bloggers re-publish or cite these new articles, and not our post. they don’t feel the need anymore to credit designboom, because the republished article is already complete. fact is that a lot of the traffic for this specific topic / article, which was originally curated and edited by us, goes back to others and not to us. — how much content should a blogger be allowed to excerpt from another source while linking to that source? for the future we would hope that our friends’ sites use, let’s say only 30% of the image material of our articles and then link and drive a significant amount of traffic back to us. in fact, this has never been an issue, and in the past we all have agreed on this, blogs usually do (before design feed aggregators ate up everything). — any idea how to solve this problem? there is no advantage becoming combative, we encourage to contact us if in doubt or if you want to reproduce more of the body than a short excerpt and 30% of images.

what is your opinion? we welcome all suggestions and feedback