Copyright, Blogs and Fair Use
One of the things I want to do with my blog is often cite research articles, and I often want to include a figure or text from those articles. There is obviously then an issue of copyright that I need to address.
There are no real guidelines1 on what to do, but I plan to do the following unless I find that I'm doing wrong:
I will always cite the original article.
I will never quote a substantial part of any article.
When reusing figures from any article protected by copyright I'll degrade2 them in some way, e.g. lower the resolution or remove legend and/or axis information) to encourage readers of my blog to go to the original article if they want to refer to it or use it themselves.
I hope that in this way I will remain within the fair use criteria ... as usual with these things I wont really know if this is fair use unless someone objects and claims it isn't. It does seem fair to me.
(Updated May 24th and again July 1st, 2005)