I have a website and I want to repost other news articles on it. Does anyone know the rules?

Question

Can I repost any news I want? I am not making money from the site. But I also wonder if I was making money would the rules differ?

Answer 1

It's called copyright law and varies from country to country. The rules do indeed differ in the USA if you are making money, and just in general if you are making money, you need to be careful to follow the rules.

In short, you can repost any news you want, if you use your own words. You cannot copy and paste articles from CNN, MSN,  etc without their permission. Yes, people do it all the time. They are breaking the law.

If you are trying to make a professional  site it's best to follow the rules. Even a reasonable attempt to stay inside the law is a good idea and affords you a lot of legal protection, I use a lot of images on my blog and always put a Fair Use notice at the bottom of the post, if you are in the USA you can get away with a lot of stuff if you can legitimately claim it as Fair Use.

Now if I was making millions of dollars on my blog (I make zero dollars) my notices would have to be much more legalistic and likely I couldn't even use most of what I now use and claim as Fair Use.

Short answers:

Yes. :)

No.

Absolutely positively, the rules are far more strict (or more likely to be enforced) if you are a commercial enterprise.