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I'm going to add a news page to my website which will include short snippets from other copyrighted sources, I'm going to only mention the title and maybe a short descriptions and link them to the source.

But I'm not sure how many words I'm allowed to use for each snippet on my website? also consider that it's going to be exact copy/paste.

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Probably maximum of four words? Google will know, of course, and flag it as duplicate content, thus negatively affecting your SEO. What exactly, are you quoting though? – ionFish Sep 12 '12 at 19:36
Well, I have something simple like regular news websites in my mind, like this news.yahoo.com scroll beneath the images to see what I mean... the only different is I'm going to link snippets to their original source and I will not host any major content on my website. I'm going to collect news titles related to my activity from popular websites and list them in one page, probably with a nofollow... I even might include some tweets using twitter's widget or my custom widget... – Omne Sep 12 '12 at 19:52
BTW, where did you get the "maximum of four words" from?! it seems lowish... :s – Omne Sep 12 '12 at 20:00
That's a number I came up with myself, because it's better to be on the safe side. But look at it overall: If you have multiple snippets from other sites, they add up right? You could have 100 snippets of 3 words, as your entire site. That's about two solid paragraphs, from different sources. Will Google pick up on that? I don't know. – ionFish Sep 12 '12 at 20:12
Yeah, that's what I was thinking about, that if it will count per article or per main source... in my case most of the titles will come from one source... I reviewed the fair use too, but I can't figure it... see these: fairuse.stanford.edu/Copyright_and_Fair_Use_Overview/chapter9/… fairuse.stanford.edu/Copyright_and_Fair_Use_Overview/chapter9/… – Omne Sep 12 '12 at 20:18

1 Answer

up vote 1 down vote accepted

Getting hit for duplicate content shouldn't be his primary concern. It should be who the copyright holders are.

This is a question of fair use and should be answered by lawyers (unfortunately).

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Perhaps you're right, I would get a better answer if I discuss it with a lawyer, I'll ask eff.org, they'll probably help me for free ;) I'll try to contact the copyright holders too, maybe I could get their permission... – Omne Sep 16 '12 at 9:02

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