It’s probably not feasible at the moment, but with the increasing complexity of Google’s spiders and algorithms, this will happen someday soon… It’s exactly what was warned about in the video EPIC 2014 where they predicted that Google’s computers will “…construct news stories dynamically, stripping sentences and facts from all content sources and recombining them. The computer writes a news story for every user.”

It sounds like fear-mongering, but man it raises a really interesting question: What happens when technology allows you to stay well within “fair use” boundaries, but at the same time allows you to construct (and profit from) brand new news stories aggregated from others’ content?

The only potential wrinkle would be if the paragraphs weren’t the entire contents of the postings — but rather a fair-use sized portion.

In my case, since this is published under a Creative Commons license, you could publish it all for non-commercial purposes.

An RSS feed that includes everything is being *given away* by the site creating the feed. So there’s no issue there, either. No one is forced to give it away; and in fact RSS allows for summaries instead of full feeds.

The only place where this is an issue is when someone takes the full text/audio/video or a substantial — i.e. not fair-use size — piece of the original content and then gives it away online. I don’t endorse that.

Aggregating short quotes and selling them is absolutely part of fair use, in my own view. Sometimes aggregation is the creation of something new, just in the collecting. So feel free to grab a quote here and there from my work and use it as part of something you sell. Just point to the original and give me credit, and I’ll be happy.

It costs newspaper companies more to print and distribute a newspaper than they make in circulation revenue. This has been true for years.

So we’re *already* giving away the content. It’s about finding advertisers to pay for the audience we pay to aggragate.

“This isn’t about commentary or anything like it. I can quote from other people’s work in a new work — say, a regular news article or magazine piece that has no commentary at all — and get paid handsomely, and the money is mine, not yours in any respect. That is the essence of fair use.”

I don’t think that’s true — you may use a *portion* of it but not on it’s own… and not just because… if this was true, I could just take your blog, Jay’s blog and Jeff’s blog and keep alternating “quotes” from them until I’m done with all the content and sell the stuff…

“If we have to get permission or, worse, pay to quote someone — for whatever reason — *then all kinds of valuable work will be much, much harder to do, if not outright impossible* [my emphasis]“.

I agree with the part I emphasized, I think this is what fair use is all about (or if it’s NOT…it *should* be!): being able to use a part of others’ work *provided* that you use it to do some valuable work of your own… (giving people the right to use the stuff… just because… well, just to make money off of it! defeats the rationale of fair use — this means I disagree with having permission to “quote…(…) for whatever reason”).

Delia

But even if I didn’t want you to do it, I could not stop you from quoting a headline and short bit of what I write. That is fair use, no matter what you do with it.

This isn’t about commentary or anything like it. I can quote from other people’s work in a new work — say, a regular news article or magazine piece that has no commentary at all — and get paid handsomely, and the money is mine, not yours in any respect. That is the essence of fair use.

If we have to get permission or, worse, pay to quote someone — for whatever reason — then all kinds of valuable work will be much, much harder to do, if not outright impossible.

suppose I took your blog, Jay’s blog and Jeff’s blog and figured out how to sell the content (every little bit of it…) without producing any new content: you might not mind it but I don’t think I should be able to do just do that without compensating you (unless you gave me permission, of course)… D.