Just a reminder about our copyright policy...

"Copyright Guidelines:
Copyright infringement is illegal. USmessageboard.com will enforce the law. Never post an article in its entirety. When posting copyrighted material, please use small sections or link to the article. When posting copyrighted material you MUST give credit to the author in your post. You are responsible for including links/credit, regardless of how you originally came across the material."

Beginning today, we ask the assistance of our users in enforcing this policy.

If you see an article posted in its' entirety, even if a link is provided, please report the post for administrative action.

Beginning today, when we are made aware of such violations of the site's rules, we will delete the offending post and issue a Copyright Infringement infraction worth 2 points. The infraction will expire in 30 days. Anyone who collects 10 points will automatically be banned from the site for 7 days.

Feel free to link to sources and quote samples from those sources in your posts. Just don't post all or significant amounts of someone elses material and think the addition of a link makes it ok.

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Currently whipping the hamsters to keep things running.
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Why? If I post an entire article, including the copyright & source information...how would that jeopardize any copyrights?

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Luminous Beings Are We.

Scooter is the former owner of the board. He no longer posts here. "Why" is because the law says so. This board will comply with the law. It's this way on any and every message board I have ever been on.

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You can't always be first .... but you CAN be NEXT

I am not trying to be difficult. I just want to understand.

This is a new law? Every message board out there allows it as long as you post the copyright & source information as well. In fact, you guys have not said anything until now.

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Luminous Beings Are We.

You just noticed it now. The initial post is date 5-25-07 and was a reiteration of what is posted in the rules. It has in fact been a rule on this board since at least prior to my joining in 2004.

You cannot reprint an author's work in it's entirety. That is copyright infringement and the owner of this board can be sued for it. If other boards allow it, that's on them. I am only concerned with this one.

If the article is well written, you need only post the first 2-3 paragraphs and a link to the entire article. If a reader's interest is not captured within the first two paragraphs, the journalist writing it obviously didn't pay attention in class, because that is a steadfast rule of writing news articles.

An interested reader who doesn't want to make the mistake of talking out his butt is going to follow the link and read the entire article. It requires very little effort.

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You can't always be first .... but you CAN be NEXT