Copyright Protections and Fair Use Standards

Daily Kos strongly encourages all Community members contributing content to the site to respect copyright protections and fair use guidelines. These standards apply to text and to images. We include our expectations in our site's Rules of the Road; violations of these rules can lead to sanctions, up to and including banning. 

Within the site's Terms of Service statement, the section called "Copyrights and Trademarks" explains the key distinctions to know regarding copyright for material posted here. There are three general categories of text-based content to consider: staff-written; community-written; and reprinted from other sources.

Regarding staff-written material:

All site content written by Daily Kos staff is published under an open content license. That is, anyone can republish it anywhere, for any purpose, without written permission. That’s not a typo. WITHOUT.

Community-written material defaults to open source licensing, but individual authors may choose at their discretion to change that license to be more restrictive. Content subject to a community author's copyright must be labeled as such.

Content reprinted from other sites (known as third-party content, indicated in part by the listing of the original publication's name as the byline) is subject to the copyright guidelines from the original source.

Our site design for articles builds in many ways to indicate the original source for republished material, including hyperlinks formatting text, and attribution and description fields as well as captions for images.

The legal doctrine of “fair use” allows people to quote brief portions of a news story for the purpose of letting people know about a story, commenting on the story, etc. The generally-accepted maximum length of excerpted material is three paragraphs. Or, the short explanation, from kos himself: "Do not steal other people's content, whether it's words or pictures, without explicit permission to do so. Doing so is a bannable offense."

Images fall into a different copyright/license category than text. They do not default to "open source" status but retain the copyright restrictions applied by their site of origin. Furthermore, "Fair Use" of images is much less flexible. In general, unless you have permission from the image creator or the image is released for public use, you should not assume you can upload it somewhere else and use it, even if you provide commentary on it.

If you are looking for images to reuse for the purpose of illustrating a story, note that the image library does provide reusable images. The images in the Daily Kos Library uploaded by staff include pictures of most public figures and many current events that are appropriately licensed. 

Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, responsibility for enforcing copyright violations is placed on the copyright holders. If we are notified of a potential violation, we will investigate and remove material we find to be infringing.

If you are a copyright holder wishing to protect your rights regarding something posted on this site, please follow this link for guidelines and directions for submitting a notice.