A reminder about FanPosts

I hate to do this because it's totally unrelated to hockey, but it's been a long time and it seems it's time for a refresher.

SB Nation has a great platform that allows for a lot of access for people who aren't on the masthead. I can't think of another place that allows for so much community participation. However, as they say, with great power comes great responsibility, and that's true here as well.

The responsibility I'm talking about is adherence to copyright.

If you want to post a link to a post on another blog or a newspaper article, great! Please feel free to do so by heading down the sidebar to FanShots and sharing your link. It'll let you add a bit of commentary if you please, and you probably should just to give some context for your link. What you cannot do is copy the entire post or large portion of a post, even if you credit the other publication or author. While we and SBN might not get in trouble if nobody here noticed it, obviously that's not the case if we become aware of what's happened. If we see potential copyright violation, we're under obligation to remove it as quickly as possible. If you're looking for the post about the Del Zotto/Neal incident, that's what happened to it. It sucks in a way because that post was generating a lot of good discussion, but we really didn't have a choice in the matter. If you're wondering perhaps why that doesn't seem to apply to Jack Farrell's FanPosts, well, that's simple--he's crossposting his own material, implicitly giving SBN permission to use it.

So, just like doing your homework in high school, no copying and pasting off of websites.

A similar guideline exists for pictures. If you didn't get the picture out of the FanPost interface itself or you did not take the picture with your own hands, you can't post the picture, even if you credit the original photographer. If you post it anyway and an editor sees it, we are obligated to remove the picture. We have a license to use certain Getty press shots--the ones you see in the posting interface--and that's pretty much it. If what you want there doesn't exist, you have to make sure that the photo is your own or released under the proper Creative Commons license much in the same way that photos are posted on Wikipedia. If in doubt, leave it out.

Anyway, sorry to sound like an overgrown hall monitor, but now and then the issue crops up, and because this time it nuked quite a long comment thread, I felt it was as good a time as any for a public reminder.

Thanks!