As far as copyright goes, that's not really how it works. It isn't legal to upload the latest hit movie as long as you include the credits. There is the concept of "fair use" where you can use a PORTION of a work in your work, but copy pasting an entire article isn't kosher unless you have permission from the rightsholder.
Actually, that's just a perversion of what BigCorp wants you to believe about fair use. There's nothing in fair use doctrine that says you can only use a PORTION and not the WHOLE. It has several criteria to determine if your use is fair or not. It depends if it's used for parody, or as a criticism, or simply because you're talking ABOUT the article in question, as opposed to just hoarding and putting it online for people to download. Or if the use is transformative.
"Fair use, a limitation and exception to the exclusive right granted by copyright law to the author of a creative work, is a doctrine in United States copyright law that allows limited use of copyrighted material without acquiring permission from the rights holders. Examples of fair use include commentary, criticism, news reporting, research, teaching, library archiving and scholarship. It provides for the legal, non-licensed citation or incorporation of copyrighted material in another author's work under a four-factor balancing test. The term fair use originated in the United States. A similar principle, fair dealing, exists in some other common law jurisdictions. Civil law jurisdictions have other limitations and exceptions to copyright."
Sure, if it's smaller, the bigger the chance the use is fair. Copypasting an entire BOOK because you disagree with paragraph 2 page 153 would probably not be fair use. Also unlikely that you feel the need to criticize the ENTIRE book verbatim, sentence by sentence. But people just assume it's a percentage of what you use what matters, so even if it's a quote, they go "you can't use the ENTIRE quote paragraph, at most 2 or 3 words!". That's just wrong.
So yeah, beware the Streisand effect, you might end up in Slashdot or one of those major Fair Use defense blogs as "Person pissed that someone copied a paper of his, sues for copyright, threatens to take down domain, HERE'S THE LINK"... then forget about having it removed from Google. Also just because a paper says "it's a clear copyright violation" doesn't necessarily make it true. They don't believe in fair use, period (unless they're the ones doing it). Just ask Righthaven or the Las Vegas Review Journal or the Associate Press.
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Topic: Help with a kind of urgent question (Read 2710 times)