Update: The awesome power of the blogosphere has got Shelley an apology (see also this comment for some welcome clarification on her usage rights). Whilst this is great news, I think that the murky issues of where blogs stand with respect to copyright law remain; we’re going to have to remain vigilant on this one.
A couple of days ago, Shelley over at Retrospectacle wrote a post examining this paper from the Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture published by John Wiley and Sons, and explained that contrary to what many media outlets were proclaiming, it did not provide evidence that your daily fruit ration was best ingested in alcoholic form. The next day
she received a letter from the journal editors, claiming that she had breached copyright by including a table and graph from the paper in her post, and threatening to unleash the Wiley lawyers on her.
It goes without saying that this smacks more than a little of bullying (why contact Shelley and not the Seed Overlords?), but it’s also a matter of some concern for all science bloggers (senso lato), because a large part of what most of us do is write about recently published research, and sometimes the only way to really describe the results is to use figures and tables from the papers in question. When I do this, I always make sure that I link to the paper in question (I normally try to find a web page for the authors, too), and I clearly state which figure I’m using; and like many people, I was under the impression that this was acceptable under ‘Fair Use’ guidelines. It seems that some people beg to differ, and if they’re right then practically all of us could be in the legal firing line.

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