Blog Republic

Is blockquoting by bloggers plagiarism?

by Darren

I caught a snippet of a conversation this week online that mentioned the blogger thought that all blockquotes were plagiarism. This view point suprised me, especially in the context of a linking to a page with full attribution. I can’t for the life of me find the original post, but I did manage to find a number of similar conversations going back several years. It appears it’s a mixed issue.

Bloggers, of course, almost always quote other sources, or display image files in their posts. Most of them rely on the doctrine of Fair Use to protect them. Image files are generally intellectual property that might be enforced by company attorneys. It appeared the issued kicked up a bit in 2004. Linked from that story was the attorney who sought intellectual property protection for Penthouse images..

I found an extremely reasonable comment by Cory Doctorow in this post:

I believe that the appropriate best practice for quoting (including “quotations” of images) should be to quote *exactly* as much as you need to tell the best story possible — that is, to make your point as well as you possibly can, given the material and your commentary on it — and to not use *one pixel or word more*. My reading of Fair Use is that this is a defensible practice: the thing here isn’t to to use only 50% of a post, or 50% of an image, but rather, to use just enough to make your point.

The rules are a bit more stringent for images, but I can find no widespread movement to indicate blockquoting is an issue. As long as the appropriate attribution is made, I’d say this is not a form of plagiarism, but a legitimate. Even Andy Hagan thought it all was copacetic, although neither he nor I are laywers, I pretty much agree with him. As long as you’re reviewing or criticising or adding something to another’s work, Fair Use will probably apply.