Wall Street Journal Copyright

September 24, 2002 4:11 PM

This is about the fifth or sixth thread since July to link to an e-mailed article from the Wall Street Journal Online. I only bring this up because it violates the terms of WSJ.com's subscriber agreement, and could cause copyright problems both for the individual users linking to them and for the 'Filter.
posted by dogmatic to etiquette/policy at 4:11 PM (5 comments total)

From the Subscriber agreement:

5. Limitations on Use.

a. Only one individual may access WSJ.com at the same time using the same user name or password, unless we agree otherwise.

b.The content available through WSJ.com is our property or the property of our licensors and is protected by copyright and other intellectual property laws. You may display or print the content available through WSJ.com for your personal, non-commercial use only.

You agree not to sell, publish, distribute, retransmit or otherwise provide access to the content received through WSJ.com to anyone, including your fellow employees, with the following two exceptions:

(i) You may occasionally distribute a copy of an article or a portion of an article from WSJ.com in non-electronic form to a few individuals without charge, provided you include all copyright and other proprietary rights notices in the same form in which the notices appear in WSJ.com, original source attribution, and the phrase "Used with permission from The Wall Street Journal Online" or "Used with permission from Barron's Online." Please consult the Dow Jones Reprints web site if you need to distribute an article from WSJ.com to a larger number of individuals, on a regular basis or in any other manner not expressly permitted by this Agreement.

(ii) You may occasionally use our "E-mail This" service to e-mail an article from WSJ.com to a few individuals, without charge. You are not permitted to use this service for the purpose of regularly providing other users with access to content from WSJ.com.

c. You agree not to create abstracts from, scrape or display headlines from our content for use on another web site or service. You agree not to post any content from WSJ.com to newsgroups, mail lists or electronic bulletin boards, without our written consent.
posted by dogmatic at 4:13 PM on September 24, 2002

It's on the Obscure Store too (probably was there first for all I know). If it was a problem, I'd probably hear about it.
posted by mathowie at 4:14 PM on September 24, 2002

Let's assume, for the sake of my argument, that I was emailed this articled by my mom, or something.
I click the link that was sent to me.
I go straight to the article. So as far as I'm aware, it's a public URL, which I can link to as much as I like.

I'd be interested in hearing if this is the case with those who've posted the threads in question.

Even if a copy of the TOS is sent along with every e-mail notice, I could be getting it second-hand, in which the person who sends it to me sends only the article link.

I question whether this policy can actually be enforced anymore than them saying, "Don't make photocopies of our print articles for all of your friends." The content is completely unprotected, and at no point am I told that its use is restricted. They didn't even stick a little banner or something at the top of the page. They're effectively operating on the honor system, and if they get screwed because they can't be bothered to implement some sort of rudimentary security or something, I don't see that as the user's responsibility.

As for copyright problems, I figure it'd go no further than them sending Matt an e-mail saying, "Stop that," and him deleting the link. Same for the poster, although if it's done repeatedly, they'd obviously have a case.
posted by Su at 6:24 PM on September 24, 2002

Beyond what Su said, the html-email message that's sent when you email a WSJ article to someone gives that person the option of then emailing to whoever they want. Presumably, the recipients of that second emailing are also given that option, and those recipients, ad infinitum. How is posting it to MeFi any different from this unlimited forwardability WSJ has built into the system themselves? Is this any more aggregious than setting up dummy username/passwords for NYTimes.com, or worse, creating a web app that does so automatically?

Until their lawyers complain, I say link away.
posted by me3dia at 9:03 AM on September 25, 2002

You don't actually have to go through the emailing thing, check the URLs. You just add article_email/ right after the domain and voila, a no registration required WSJ link.
posted by stupidsexyFlanders at 11:19 AM on September 25, 2002