This is new to me and a bit concerning, I had always assumed as long as a source is cited and the content quoted all is above board. Would like to know if there's more we need to know here, I want to be compliant, especially when it comes to IP.
Posting links to cited online newspaper articles is generally fine: when the reader gets there via a click from your site, the site's owner is then in charge of interpreting any info that comes with the link, including whether it's a gift link or one the paper has officially provided as "free" for subscribers to share elsewhere. If a cited link is just a basic URL then it's still up to that site owner to decide how to treat the visitor who came in through a link from your site: is it openly accessible, if not then is he a subscriber, would he like to log in, would he like to read three free pieces and then be asked if he wants to subscribe, etc.
As far as quotes go, if a cited link is from a site's "free link" option for a subscriber to pass along an article, or if a member had used a gift link for legit "paywall removal," then seeing some extensive quotes also included by a member posting to your site may not be problematic --- the publisher has meant to make this article freely available with subscribers being the relay mechanism-- but otherwise the principles of
fair use apply more strictly, and quotes should be a small percentage of the content.
The mitigating factor against initiation of copyright-level litigation for most news outlets is that a citation in a "social media" venue, e.g. a post with a link and some quoted content, may well drive new traffic to the site.
That's altogether different however to just plagiarizing content or closely paraphrasing it without attribution. But.. attribution itself does not override "fair use" considerations. Again though, with modern news outlets, something like putting a screenshot of a photo complete with credits into a social media post along with a link to the piece probably gets a shrug from the outlet, as it's like a free ad: "wow Joe Smith is a hell of a photographer and here's where he writes from..."
That doesn't mean some blogger or fan can post screenshots of every Joe Smith photo on the net though. For that, permission of the copyright owner is required.
One thing you definitely don't want members to do is to advocate anything illegal including linking to methods of stripping DRM protection of copyrighted works. So there can be times that just citing "a link" in a post to your site should be considered a violation. Member guidelines need to make that clear.
Speaking of over the top "quotation percentage," and issues of links to works with violated copyright: A couple of Russians just got busted in Argentina at the request of the USA for having run Z-Library, a collection of over 200 domains that since 2009 had purported to be a source of "free" ebooks, but which actually had people uploading and downloading copyrighted ebooks from which the DRM had been stripped, sometimes within hours of a book's release for sale to the public. All that just got shut down. Authors of over 11 million books had been deprived of potential royalties for their efforts.
“As alleged, the defendants profited illegally off work they stole, often uploading works within mere hours of publication, and in the process victimized authors, publishers and booksellers,” stated United States Attorney Peace. “This Office is committed to protecting the intellectual property...
www.justice.gov
How's all that for a digression?
And now back to what Meta is up to in its threat to remove news outlets feeds from its site.... for my money, Facebook has been struggling to stay relevant for awhile now; the option to grab up some news while checking up on the grandkids' photos or a family reunion has been a boon to Meta for sure.
So I believe that Meta has more to lose than do the newspapers, whose points of traffic enhancement are all over the place now: via citations in other social media platforms, citations in other newspapers via "...as originally reported in..." and even in a combo of those, e.g. some tweet embedded in an online blog's commentary that happens to cite a newspaper article with a link to it. Does that sound like someone besides Meta might be scarfing up ad revenue here and there for "news"? Hell yeah.
