Quick legal question about quoting copyrighted materials

[Jondot]

Just wondering if anyone with a little legal know-how could help me out here.

I'm looking into creating something along the same lines as Rotten Tomatoes - essentially a website that looks at reviews from existing publications, quotes a fragment of them, whether it's a positive review or not, then uses that data to calculate a rating of the product being reviewed. My concern at the minute is the likelihood of receiving a nice cease and desist order from any/every publication I were to quote - obviously it'd only be a 140 character or so extract, and would sit with the publication/author's name and a link back to the source website, but I would essentially be taking someone else's work and using for my own purposes.

I'm not having much luck finding a specific answer on Google - most of them have been about the situation with quoting within a blog, which naturally would be different because it's a personal website rather than something that may or may not be commercial.

What I have found is a couple of clauses in the T&Cs of certain sites. One Haymarket publication has this, for example:

3. Prohibited use

You agree not to use the Website:

to create a database (electronic or otherwise) that includes material downloaded or otherwise obtained from the Website except where expressly permitted on the Website;

...which pretty much wipes out any hope of quoting anything on there for use in anything ever. In that situation, would it be incredibly cheeky to not include an extract, but still include some way of saying if the review was positive or negative along with their name?


Thanks muchly

 

[Neal]

I was under the impression that you could quote excerpts of reviews and articles as long as you did reference their origin rather than not cite a source. I know a law has been introduced fairly recently which prevents you from quoting sources out of context. This is mostly intended for movie posters so that when a reviewer says "This film is a great pile of excrement" they can't put "...great..." says Mr Reviewer on the poster.

 

[Danoff]

Critique is considered fair use of copyrighted material. But you have to limit what you use to only what is needed to make the point. So if you want to somehow review the reviewers, that's a fair use. It's not fair use to simply show their review on your website.

From a journalistic point of view you can report what others are saying about a movie, but you need to do it from a reporting point of view. It's probably fair to say Ebert and Roper gave this movie two thumbs up, rotten tomatoes gave it 80%, etc. etc. But you wouldn't want to include much if any of the synopsis or evaluation of the movie. Try to think of what a newspaper would include: "Ebert and Roper gave it two thumbs up saying it is a 'must see' and 'oscar worthy'." That much would probably be fair use.

 

[Jondot]

Interesting. So feasibly I could write my own review on a particular product and include some opinions from elsewhere to back up my thoughts or provide balance, but - without their expressed permission at least - quoting chunks of their review on their own is a no-no. Hmm.

Just out of interest, where d'you reckon I would stand on displaying the rating (ie marks out of ten) given by another website rather than an extract of review? Bear in mind that I'm thinking of quoting it on its own with nothing more than a link back to the original article, rather than using it within a block of my own writing. I'd have thought it'd come with many of the same issues, but a guy can hope.

 

[Danoff]

You should probably consult a lawyer to be sure, but I think you'd be ok quoting their rating with a link to it. They might even like the advertisement for their review. Think of yourself as a journalist publishing an article summarizing the various reviews on a particular movie (by showing the rating). Their review counts as entertainment news.

 

[BobK]

The most important thing to keep in mind with copyright issues is the fact that what's a copyvio and what isn't is whatever your legal team (or the oppositions' of course) can convince the judge it is. Case law is littered with outrageous examples each way, with the trend being that the side with the higher paid legal staff wins.

If you are hit with a cease and desist you will have to pay money, perhaps lots of money, to defend against it. Doesn't matter if their case is totally without merit, you'll still have to pay to get a judge to say so.