Reblog This at Your Own Legal Risk

Last week, WordPress, the top host of blogs, added a “reblog" feature. Clicking that button composes a new post housed on your blog suffixed with the headline, description, thumbnail and link to the source material -- a process nearly identical to adding a link to your Facebook profile.

“Borrowing" content has been a common practice among bloggers practically from the beginning. You can take whatever you want as long as you give credit, right?

Not necessarily.

Excerpts of text generally fall within the “fair-use" doctrine of U.S. copyright law. Bloggers can freely use parts of someone else's writing to help make a point. Wholesale reproduction of an article is never a good idea. Still, courts may be more lenient with noncommercial blogs -- so there's solid reason to think twice about slapping up Google ads. Or packaging and selling a newspaper's content in an iPad app.

Reposting photos is dicier. You don't commonly excerpt an image. Most photographers expect to be compensated when someone is using their work in a for-profit venue. But fair use can come into play if the blog post's commentary pertains specifically to the photo, rather than using the image as a complement.

Courts also might be more forgiving if reblogging is a practice that's very common within the online community the content was initially published in, noted Neil Netanel, a professor at the UCLA School of Law. However, now that reblogging is commonplace in the majority of platforms, where do we draw the line? Or is copyright law out of date?