Folks,
Besides Saul’s rules, posted every Monday, I need to remind folks here of TMF rules for posting on its forums.
Yes, it’s a odd time right now in the midst of this pandemic, where perhaps we can relax some of the regular rules – but breaking this one can threaten TMF with potential legal action, so I see these violations as possible harm against our favorite forum on this long-time investor educational site.
I’m seeing this one rule broken too often, and it’s a shame, as legally TMF needs to pull these posts, even after they are getting a lot of recs here.
That rule is that you CANNOT reproduce material from other copyrighted sites in their entirety. Even with attribution! The general rule of thumb is that you should be not be posting more than 2-3 quoted paragraphs of material that you are copying from blogs, articles, etc, and then should be linking to the source. More can be allowed if you are working it all into your own narrative, instead of merely copying in large blocks of someone else’s text.
Please see the rules on copying text from other folks’ work here: https://www.fool.com/community/posting-guidelines/#copyright…
Contributors may summarize articles and other writings and post an occasional sentence or two, but not the entire piece. Articles copied into our boards in their entirety will be removed. Summarizing is giving a brief outline of the article in your own words, or the quoting of brief passages in combination with your own relevant thoughts.
Let’s not break copyright law when its so easily avoidable. Just give us a link and a recap, and enhance it further with your own thoughts.
-muji
long this board