Tonight I'm reading more about fair use and I'm getting annoyed by the possibility that Wordpress.com shut down my blog there over some misunderstanding of copywrite law.
Why are people so freaking uptight?
I am reporting news, researching topics of interest to me, and educating people about general interest science topics. On my blog, I am also providing a valuable service by collecting items of interest from different sources for people with similar interests.
Cite your sources, provide links, don't plagiarize, and that should be it.
Short quotations will usually be fair use, not copyright infringement. The Copyright Act says that "fair use...for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright." So if you are commenting on or criticizing an item someone else has posted, you have a fair use right to quote. The law favors "transformative" uses — commentary, either praise or criticism, is better than straight copying — but courts have said that even putting a piece of an existing work into a new context (such as a thumbnail in an image search engine) counts as "transformative." - eff
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