A blogger's posting of an eight-line excerpt from a 30-line online newspaper article, coupled with a link to the full article on the newspaper Web site, is protected by the copyright fair use doctrine, a district court ruled. Reviewing the statutory fair use factors, the court found that while the blog provided information on the real estate market, the underlying purpose of the blog was to advertise the blogger's real estate business. However, the court found that the remaining factors favored the blogger: the portion of the work that he excerpted was factual in nature; only eight out of 30 sentences were used; he directed readers to the full text of the article; and his use of the copyrighted material was not likely to have an effect on the market for the article, because the portion copied did not contain the author's original commentary and thus did not dilute the market for the work.
Righthaven LLC v. Realty One Group, Inc., 2010 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 111576 (D. Nev. Oct. 19, 2010) DownloadPDF
