Would This Be Illegal?

[Tundra]

To have a site or livejournal community, where I or people put up letters to the editor? As in ones from the newspaper. Possibly the stupid ones, for mocking purposes. :P
I'm pretty sure that there would be problems however. hmn.

Would it make sense to have a LJ or similar where people post up their own letters (stupid or not) to the editor that they'd actually put into the newspaper? Or that they'd tried to get into the newspaper but it didn't make it? Or would it just end up being totally pointless.

[Lord of Fools]

Creating a place to mock stupid letters to the editor would be fairly good, but also open up the playing field for lots of political debate. My view of a stupid letter to the editor, for instance, might be a letter someone else thinks is a perfectly legitimate statement.

[Tundra]

Wouldn't it be illegal due to copyright? I don't mind political debate.

[MichaelB]

Not for parody or discussion purposes.

[Gholam]

You could always reference where it was taken from, eg the paper name etc, might cover part of yourself if there was an issue.

[Tundra]

I'd be typing it up in full though, as having excerpts of letters to the editor don't really work...
I'd reference it of course.

[Lord of Fools]

In that case, I don't think so: teachers do it for classes all the time, and I'm pretty sure they're drilled not only in copyright laws but the school's own guidelines. The newspaper does not have a disclaimer telling you not to copy parts of it, as do books, CDs and some magazines, so I'm going to say legality won't be an issue. It would only really be a problem if you were going to copy an article or editorial in full without crediting the real writer, and presenting it as your own work.

[Tundra]

No, but some newspapers lately (in the past few months ) sued someone for blogging about their newspaper articles and quoting a few sentences of a larger article they'd summarised. Even though they'd linked to the real online article.

(and *cough* teachers break copyright rules... notice that they show you videos at school? Yeah they're technically not licensed to do that most of the time they're just bringing in a dvd from home... their workbooks they're allowed to photocopy for their own classes use, as per the terms of the copyright.)

But I would be copying a *published letter* in full. (even though I'd credit with who wrote it and what newspaper it was from and the date)

[penguin104]

as long as you mention what newspaper you copied it from you should not have any problems at all. You can either copy part of the letter or the whole thing. You would only get in trouble if you pretended that you wrote the letters yourself.

and if you allow other people to post things, make sure you have a notice on your site that you are not responsible for the accuracy of things posted by other users. (just in case someone makes something up that might offent the newspaper etc)