[etni] Re: I need some legal advice, please

Copyright is a pretty complicated legal area, and I am NOT a lawyer, but I have 
read up quite a bit about copyright law, so I feel somewhat qualified to answer 
your questions.
   
  1) Sending a copy of one article to a friend would probably fall into the 
area of fair use, so there should be no problem there. 
   
  2) The fact that you are using the article for a non-profit organization in 
no way absolves you from following copyright law. You would not be able to 
either translate or use the original article for a non-profit organization 
without getting official permission from the newspaper. (Most have no problem 
giving that permission, but expect to be accredited for the article, and may 
want to approve the translation before allowing it to be published.)
   
  3) On the other hand, rewriting an article could be fine. According to 
copyright laws, wording is copyrighted rather than ideas. (The way the material 
is organized could also be copyrighted.) That means that you could take any 
ideas found in an article, rephrase them, and publish them with no legal 
impediment. According to the law, a phrase is three or more words that appear 
together. Exceptions would be common phrases which there is no way of 
rephrasing. For example, copying the phrase "He was born in 1949" would not be 
illegal since there really aren't too many other ways to phrase that. However, 
there are not too many sentences that cannot be rephrased someway or the other. 
   
  By the way, copyright laws DO apply to textbooks as well. Photocopying an 
unseen for a class is illegal... I know that it's not easy to teach without 
photocopying here and there, but those are the facts. Just some food for 
thought.  
   
  All the best,
  Rivka
   
  Hi ETNI-ers,

 In the following scenarios I would like to know if I have any legal 
obligations either to the newspaper or to the author of the article in 
question,  or to both.

 [1] I read an article in an Israeli Hebrew-language newspaper, enjoy
 it, 
and decide to send a copy of it to a friend.

 [2] Reading the same newspaper, I decide to translate an article into 
English and use both versions in a non-profit organization.

 [3] As in [2] above, but this time the organization is a for-profit 
organization.

 [4] As in [3] above but this time I take the article, re-write it in
 my own 
words and use it in a for-profit organization.

 I would greatly appreciate a legal opinion on these scenarios.
 Thanking you 
im anticipation,

 Henry



       
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