More details to this question:
Clients sometimes ask me to rewrite news articles for their publications. Both I and they would like to meet the letter of the law and avoid inappropriate copying. I was under the impression that I can avoid any legal issues if I 1) cite the source and 2) rewrite the material significantly. I was told that "significantly" means no more than 2 or consecutive 3 words of the original article remain in their original form. I would like to verify that I can continue with these guidelines and meet the letter of the law. Kindly advise.
1 ANSWER
Copyright protects the expression, not the content of a work. Thus, if you use your own words to describe the content of a news article, you would not be infringing the copyright in the article. There is no magic number of words strung together, and I could image the situation where infringment would occur even though every third word is different. My advice to you would be to distill out just the bare facts contained in a news article, and then without looking at the article, write your own story describng the facts.
Answered on Mar 04th, 2013 at 4:04 PM