Quote:
Originally Posted by shibamistress
As a blogger, and a writer, I'd have SERIOUS issues with anyone using my writing in their writing project without first contacting me and asking permission. This is my work, and while I'm happy to have others read it, it is not out there for other people to use in their own work.
Depending on how much you quote, btw, just citing is not enough to get around plagiarism. More to the point, it's just rude not to contact the person and ask for permission to use their material. Fair use allows you to use some quotations for academic purposes, but you still need to be careful how much you quote.
That said, if you contact bloggers who have written about the issues you are writing about, they might be happy to be interviewed about their experiences, which would be a much better way to go.
eta: I would add that sometimes even for small quotes you need to get permission (and possibly pay a fee) first. I had to get permission to use part of a poem for a epigraph in my second (paper) book, and it cost me $50 to do so. Obviously that will be different with blogs, but what I'm saying is that copyright is pretty complex, actually, and you need to do some research and find out more, and make sure you're very careful using other people's work.
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That's why I asked the question. I'm an academic and in scholarly writing we constantly quote each other, and we never ask for permission unless it's some sort of huge quote. The idea of scholarship is that each scholar builds on what has been done before. In the academic world we would not seriously consider asking another writer before quoting his or her work, and we would absolutely never pay someone for the "privilege" of referring to their work or quoting a passage. It's just assumed that once your work is "public" other people are going to use it. In fact, you hope other people will use it.
I was trying to figure out if the protocol for quoting would be different with blogs. People are sharing information, and in many ways the Web is like the world of academia where people share information. Honestly, it never occurred to me that it would be rude to quote from someone's blog, but I did want to make sure that if I did so, I would do according to whatever protocol is being developed for this.
I can understand a poet whose work is under copyright asking for a fee--especially if it were a short poem. I'm just trying to figure out the boundaries that are being developed with blogs. I know I see blogs quoted all the time in editorials and other writing, and I wanted to do it correctly if I decided to do it.