Re: European Parliament baulks at copyright reform vote
If I present this as a headline, short blurb and hitting that entry links out the the site with the article.
If your summary says "The Grimsby Standard's theatre review this week made note of a Press-o-matic Model 6A being seen in a production of Hamlet recently: Link Here ('Theatre: Is This A Pressed Shirt I See Before Me')" You are not liable to anything. The summary is your work, and you have copyright in it. There's no copyright in the link to the story at the source, so that's not a problem either. Headlines are titles, so they're not subject to the same restrictions on use as the body text.
But, if you instead use an automated scraper to lift the opening paragraphs of that linked story, and present lists of these as your "news" section, then you are doing nothing more than reproducing copyrighted text (the newspaper's), and yes, you've got to pay for that, because you didn't create anything. The aggregator code itself could be your copyright, but not the products of it.
The simple question when it comes to copyright is: did you make the thing? If you made it from scratch, it's yours automatically. But if you made the thing from an existing thing or things, then the question is: can the thing you made function as a sufficient replacement for having the original things you used to make it? If your new thing can't act as a substitute for its sources, you're protected by copyright again (under "fair use" and "parody" exemptions among others), but if it can, you're just reproducing existing works without permission.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
