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I want to create a international flight search engine website that links to multiple other flight searching websites and pulls the flight information into my site, by linking to the source website, giving full credit and showing the link and logo of the source site.

Users would have to book any reservations through the external websites, so at the end the site would be driving more users to the source websites.

Would this be considered 'fair use' from a legal perspective?

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  • As long as you make it clear that you are referring, I dont think any company will complain about more traffic to their site
    – Martijn
    May 21, 2014 at 13:14
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    "fair use" - regardless of what you (or us) consider "fair use" I imagine you will need to check the T&Cs of each site in question.
    – MrWhite
    May 21, 2014 at 13:52
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    Most sites that reuse content do this with a partnership and an agreement prior to development. It has to be a win win scenario. You can approach the various sites marketing departments and if approached with a win win pitch, you will likely find a friendly and helpful situation. Most marketing professionals understand how partnering with smaller efforts can drive traffic and are friendly to new ideas. Just go to them with a non-disclosure / non-compete agreement along with a simple business plan (of sorts) and you should be fine.
    – closetnoc
    May 21, 2014 at 15:53

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Here is a good reference about what constitutes "fair use" under United States copyright law: http://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/four-factors/

The upshot is that using content from another website and giving credit does NOT constitute fair use. Fair use only applies in one of the three following cases:

  • Your copy is transformative (creates something new from the original)
  • The work you are copying is facts or data
  • Only a very short excerpt was copied

Your use must also not deprive the copyright holder of any commercial value. The article goes into much more detail with relevant cases and examples.

It is generally easier to license content rather than rely on fair use. Some publishers license their content freely under Creative Commons licenses. The content on this site is available to be copied and republished under such a license with attribution required.

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