I believe that this is an important issue with news submissions that it deserves its own thread.

How do we deal with the issue of copyright?

All newspaper and magizine articles are copyrighted. Is posting the articles or a substantial amount of those articles a violation of copyright laws? I don't want to see this great website get in legal hotwater because of copyright violations.

Some websites don't mind as long as you display the webpage that contains the article in its entirety so that the advertisers are displayed.

I am not a lawyer, but in my opinion, I think this is another reason why it is important to include a link to the original article with the news submission. Not only that, it should be in two places -- at the beginning and end of the news article. The article submitted should be kept in it's original format as possible.

I propose the following format as a standard.

Original Title
Author of article
Date publlished
Link to article

(body of article)

Link to article, or link to the rest of the article if the article is overly long.

This is the format I am trying to follow. However I don't include the images associated with the article. A person has to follow the link to see the images.

My thought is that with the link in these two places, It gives the reader access to the original article. But it is also important to note that links can and do change over time which means that some links can become invalid. So this isn't a total solution to the copyright issue.

Any other thoughts or ideas?

I concur... we should have at least the links somewhere in the article to the location of origin. Sometimes even links to those articles are actually links to other articles themselves.