I have made a serious attempt to understand copyright and what constitutes a copyright violation. Sometimes I reason by way of analogy. I know that as an academic, I can copy an article from a journal in the library for my personal use under the “fair use” provision. I also know that I am not supposed to make multiple copies of this same article and distribute them to the students in my class (wasn’t this the famous case that got much of this started – Kinkos course packs).
I have a professional interest in highlighting as a reading strategy and that generated some personal interest when I learned that I could highlight within Kindle and save the highlights. At the time it occurred to me that Amazon must build in some limits to prevent a reader from highlighting an entire book or at least major parts, download the highlights, and then sending this content to others. I would think this would be a copyright violation. Maybe not.
I have come across a new online tool that clearly allows me to take the content from a source and distribute the content. Scrible.com offers a great tool for online research. You can highlight, annotate, and save your work in a library. It also turns out that you can send this content to others. Just to test what the system would let me get away with, I have some web content that requires a login. I visited this site, entered the necessary information to gain access, highlight a few pages, and shared my work through email (to a different email address). I quit the browser, opened the email account, found the email and selected the link. This opened a browser that displayed the full page from the web site with my highlights.
If I was sharing content generated by someone else, which I can simulate by send the content to a different email address, wouldn’t this be a copyright violation? You are obviously sharing content without making use of the server on which the content owner placed this material. I would think that the basic requirement for legal use would be superimposing highlights over content that is sent from the original server. In this way, the content would be provided as intended by the author. I would also assume that doing this for personal use would be acceptable (see original analogy to academic use), but you cross the line when you send the content to someone else.
Supposedly, the National Science Foundation supported this work. I keep thinking I am missing something, but what would that be?