I agree completely with everything your have said. One should never outright plagiarize another author or steal images etc. And your suggestions are always the best way to proceed in an on-line forum.
But Copyright and Fair Use are terms that are thrown around freely on the Internet these days and DMCA is making real attempts to untangle the mess. Copyright laws are difficult to enforce on the Internet. Every image, every word on the Internet has implied copyright that does not make it any easier to enforce. Given the International quality of the beast it is a quagmire at best. I’ll give you an example taken from Fred von Lohmann on The Patry Copyright Blog:
http://williampatry.blogspot.com/ (William Patry is the Senior Attorney for Copyright for Google)
Mr. Lohmann said:
Imagine the following: a work created in the US falls into the public domain in the US, but the author retains copyright in Canada. A US resident posts the work on a US server that is accessible in Canada. The author then sues in Canada, obtains a default, and attempts to enforce in a US court.
Or, perhaps more problematic, the author sues in US court over the infringement that occurs in Canada, and demands that the US court apply Canadian law to adjudicate that dispute.
To take another example, what if a EUR rights holder who enjoys protection for a collection of facts sues and obtains a default in Europe? Should a US court enforce the judgment because this is all the stuff of economic regulation? It won’t happen.Then there is the matter of what exactly does the blogger own. Yes it is your intellectual property, but you did not patent it and you did put it on the Internet, and thereby essentially in the public domain, some would argue, where anyone can access it. How reasonable is it to expect that your work has not been copied and disseminated before and do you have a right to expect that it will be kept sacrosanct when you or your blog service does not disable the right click feature on your web page. It often comes down to what is the standard in the community & what, exactly do you have a reasonable right to expect from your Blog service? Since the community is world wide, how do you determine the reasonable standard? When you send something out into the ether when people from all cultures and all walks of life have virtually unlimited access to it at the click of a mouse, is it reasonable to expect it to remain untouched, unparaphrased, unquoted or uncopied? Is it reasonable to think that no one will ever print it or share it or use it without your knowledge and consent?
Intent, and damage to the commercial value of the work are important considerations. Was the intent to defame the original, or to claim the original as one’s own for commercial gain? Is the paraphrasing of another online diary actually plagiarism? Is the coping and re-posting of a photograph of an underwear model theft of intellectual property? The courts would most likely rule not. Courts have better things to do. This is a fairly new, untested concept. In one case an operator of a pirate BBS that didn't charge was acquitted because he didn't charge and therefore did not profit from the copy.
Copyright isn't an iron-clad lock on what can be published or paraphrased. It must be remembered that copyright has two main purposes, namely the protection of the author's right to obtain commercial benefit from valuable work, and more recently the protection of the author's general right to control how a work is used.
While copyright law makes it technically illegal to reproduce almost any new creative work (other than under fair use) without permission, if the work is unregistered and has no real commercial value, it gets very little protection. The author in this case can sue for an injunction against the publication, actual damages from a violation, and possibly court costs. Actual damages means actual money potentially lost by the author due to publication, plus any money gained by the defendant. But if a work has no commercial value, such as a typical E-mail message or random journal type blog posting, the actual damages will be zero. Only the most vindictive (and rich) author would sue when no damages are possible, and the courts don't look kindly on vindictive plaintiffs, unless the defendants are even more vindictive.
This kind of case is expensive to pursue and most prosecutors will not pursue it, they in fact typically, steer clear of intellectual property cases especially involving Internet blogs sites. Some find them too difficult, too murky, some find them dull, but most just find their days so packed with run-of-the-mill criminal cases, they find no need to go looking for unusual cases especially since most blogs are glorified diaries and do not contain commercial viable published works of fiction or nonfiction, project facts figures and plans, trade secrets, advertising and business plans. The law doesn't do much to protect works with no commercial value.
I would suggest a look at the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) websites section on Blogging. It can be found here:
http://www.eff.org/bloggers/
