Using news articles as website content?

[agua]

I'm not sure if the title compliments the thread - but here goes.

If I read a news article and like it, am I in breach of copyright if I use that to create an article on my site which is written by me based on the original article?

[Blue Cat Buxton]

It will come down to how much you copy from the article - that is a straight copy word for word - if you do copy some, a quote say, then you need to reference the original work.- Blogs do that "so and so said such and such " and this is what I think.

If you re write the article so it is not recogniseable as the source and add your take on the story then there should be no breach of copyright - but you may still want to reference the original to give your article credability with your readers.

[John]

If it's a big news story thats on every big news site I wouldn't bother, just read them all and post your own report. If the story is only on one news site I would write my own report and give them the credit.

[James]

I'd say John's idea's pretty good. It's always best to spread out your research, so you get all the juicy bits of info the other sites have. I think it's what most news sites do anyways.

And using other sites news articles as your content's practically just called 'blogging' now.

[Cutter]

You can quote the story, but you definately can not legally repost it.

One of the things I do with my blog is read lots of news stories. If its relevent then I will post a quote from it with a link. Because I specifically focus on website publishing I often know lots of things that the originally article did not mention.

For example, when Weblogs Inc. was bought by AOL for $25 million everyone as reporting it. I had been actually following Weblogs Inc. very close for months simply because I knew they were doing things very right. When the story broke, I was able to write substantially more about it than all of the articles could.

[James]

Yes, quote some and keep it under Fair Use. I meant that that's what blogs do.