Expert: Richard Seltzer - 6/28/2007

Question
Hi Richard, my website is trunkhustle.com a music community website and
we will be allowing artists to have a personal page to sell their mp3's...along
w/ many other features.  My question is this, on the pages that I administer
that need to stay relevant such as news, tutorials, etc., is it allowable to copy
and paste those things onto my site as long as credit is given to the source
(RSS or other media) or how do I go about keeping those things up to date?  
Thanking you in advance for any advice,

Jamar

Answer
You need permission from everyone who writes those items.  Anything posted on the Internet is copyright automatically as soon as it is written, without the author having to declare that is copyright and without the author having to register the copyright.  You should go to the Copyright Web site at the Library of Congress and familiarize yourself with the law.  There is no simple way to do what you propose.
Sorry about that.
Richard Seltzer, seltzer@samizdat.com