A Case Study on Fair Use Copyright Policy

There was a time when I was cleaning up codemakit back-links. This means removing codemakit name from websites that are not relevant or not important or are simply degrading.

The pretense of the exercise was that if the quality of back-links is improved, the website stats will improve.

The exercise dictates opening each and every website from Google search results which looks like a domain analyzer, i.e. a website that hosts information about other domains. So, for codemakit, one would find websites, hosting DNS information about codemakit.com.

An Average DNS Based Website

DNS (Domain Name Server) information hosted on such websites include, the following information,

1. Name of the website, 
2. Name of the Owner of the Domain,
3. Email address of the owner, 
4. Email address of the technical staff of the website, 
5. Contact details for privacy violation

Now obviously websites with such content are not relevant at all. So that means mailing each and every one of them asking them (Politely) to take down any content related to codemakit.com.

The problem however lies in one place. Most websites never respond to your mail. Some do respond after a week or so, apologizing that they were busy. However, there is one type of website which hosts not only the DNS information of blogs but also their content.

Such websites host the following information in addition to the DNS information

1. Meta Description
2. Meta Tags
3. Category of the website
4. Content of the website

New Type of DNS Based Website

Some often say that this was because of web owners submitting their websites to several search engines as a part of their naïve SEO strategy, only finding out later that those were not search engines but just directories hosting such information.

They use specially designed bots to copy information from your personal blog/Website and host it on their websites. On one look this can be called as a blatant violation of your copyright. (Assuming your website has a copyright notice). But only when you visit such websites you find that not only have they shirked any responsibility of violating a digital law, they are justifying their actions as well.

How do they justify or rationalize copying data from a website? By citing a Policy named as fair use Policy.

In the following example, one can see how content from codemakit.com was copied on a website. When one rushes to the contact page in protest of its violation of copyright, one would find that the website is protected by fair use policy and "threats" would not work.

In the following example, "Just one question arises, "Does the snippet provided on the website qualify as a preview?"

Related Reading,

• A really nice article on Fair use can be found at center for social media impact in their article about how journalists think about fair use
• You can also found a FAQ on Fair use at US copyright Webpage
• You can take a look at a previous article by codemakit.com on a method to find out if someone is copying from you. This is exceptionally useful if you think you too are a victim of fair use policy.

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