Blogging and Copyright

Several prominent law bloggers have noticed a few over-zealous legal disclaimers on popular blogs and Web pages around the Internet. Most notably, the North Country Gazette made this disclaimer with regards to its content:

In accordance with Fair Use of Copyright: WE FORBID ANY REPRODUCTION in part or in whole of The North Country Gazette.

That's sort of funny, since forbidding reproduction sounds like "no use" rather than "fair use." As law professor and blogger Eugene Volokh noted, merely reproducing that statement would be a copyright violation if they were right. Thankfully, they are dead wrong. The administrators of the North Country Gazette eventually removed the notices and rewrote the site's Terms of Service.

Citing other Web sites and blogs is an integral part of blogging, and if bloggers really couldn't reproduce anything from other sites, it would eliminate half of what bloggers write about.