Blogs and Copyright

Most blogs that comment on current affairs routinely break the law. Copyright law allows you to republish nothing without prior permission other than brief excerpts from the text of an article. Political blogs however routinely republish more than that -- pictures in particular. Time constraints mean that seeking prior permission to republish a picture would be unviable.

I have never however heard of a blogger being prosecuted for a breach of copyright law and I presume that is because most bloggers are willing to take down a post if someone has a legitimate objection to it. Internet publishing is fundamentally different to print publishing because a newspaper cannot withdraw all copies of what it has published whereas a blogger can cease to make available what he has written with just one mouseclick.

This blog has however been holier than most. When Scott was posting here, most of his postings were re-writes (journalists have to be good at those) and my posts normally include only very brief excepts from the original article.

Since I have been posting here, however, I have from time to time included pictures with my posts. Scott, the owner of this blog, is however a journalist so has to be more careful about these things than most of us. So he has requested that I put up no more pictures without permission of the picture owners. So my posts here will be going picture-free from now on.

As most readers are aware, however, I have from the beginning put up mirror sites for all my postings (See here or here) and I will continue to include pictures there -- as those sites are entirely my own responsibility.