Am I allowed to full show news articles in my website like what eventregistry is doing?

http://eventregistry.org/searchArticles .

Hi All, I have an interesting question!

Here, Event registry seems to wrap the whole article in a div and make the styling look as if you are reading from the real source without leaving the website. I would like to do the same with my website but I would like to know the legal implications.

Please let me know what you think :slight_smile:

I am not a lawyer, but as far as I understand it eventregistry is not able to copyright the concept, just the implementation. So, you can’t copy their code, and you probably shouldn’t even make it look the same, but you’re allowed to clone the behavior.

I thought the question was more about the legality of lifting the content from another news source?

I don’t know the answer from a legal standpoint, but ethically it would raise these flags for me:

  • Is the content you are lifting behind a paywall? If so, integrating it to your free site is pretty poor behaviour.

  • Is the content you are lifting on a site that features advertising? If so, integrating it into your site limits their ability to maintain their revenue - which is also poor behaviour.

  • Are you lifting content in such a way as it appears you wrote the content, or will you provide ample attribution and back links? The former is poor behaviour, the latter depends on the above questions.

Anyway - I am not a lawyer, I am not your lawyer, this is not legal advice etc…

Yea, I agree with you. Making my own implementation is no problem. Where the problem comes in is the legality of posting the complete news article (as far as I can see, word for word even) in their website.

I can make my own implementation of showing the full article but am I even allowed to post the full article itself?

Yes that is exactly what I am asking.

The point of why I want to do this is I want to make a website that is lightweight for news reading. I’m also adding in a new way of giving feedback to an article. As far as I know no else is doing it. So this website would work as a proof of concept for this new way of giving feedback.

At the end of the day I just want this project to be done for my portfolio. I am not planning to make any money out of this project.

I see. You could circumvent the issue entirely by just sourcing articles that are explicitly open access. The Guardian has just such a platform.

I do not think you can protect something like this. Why don’t you check USA Patents and Trademarks guidelines for copyrighting stuff.

https://www.uspto.gov/