Legal Question in Business Law in Colorado

Re: Copying content from other web pages without giving credit

If one copies wholesale the contents of another's website, that person is probably liable for copyright infringement. As the content, and the context in which it is copied is relevant to this determination, you should review the copying with an intellectual property lawyer.

Re: Copying content from other web pages without giving credit

In the United States, copyright protection is awarded to the authors of "original works of authorship, including literary, dramatic, musical, artistic, and certain other intellectual works." If the website materials are creative (i.e., not raw facts), the creator owns the copyright to the materials. Copyrights have a limited life, but unless you are dealing with VERY old material (e.g., a century old is safe) or are familiar with the creation date and the various extensions that have been enacted over the last 30 years, you should assume that the copyright continues in effect.

Even if there is a copyright, however, the owner may grant a license to use the works. In the particular example you gave, all contributions to Wikipedia are, by the express terms of the website's, licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. In the words of Wikipedia:

"The license Wikipedia uses grants free access to our content in the same sense as free software is licensed freely. This principle is known as copyleft. That is to say, Wikipedia content can be copied, modified, and redistributed so long as the new version grants the same freedoms to others and acknowledges the authors of the Wikipedia article used (a direct link back to the article satisfies our author credit requirement)."

Other variations of licenses exist, include some that impose no requirements on the user.

The bottom line is that creative materials are subject to copyright in the U.S. and unless you have a license to use the materials, you may not do so.