Blog Azeroth

Greetings all.

I'm not looking for legal advice, more of just a straw poll of blog authors on this topic. I have an idea in mind for a series of articles (10 or so) that will take principles from a book still under copyright and apply them to my blog focus (guild management).

I won't be repeating more than the chapter titles and 2-3 quotes in each article; the rest will be original content, but I wanted to get a feel for whether people think this is a wise idea.

My plan is to introduce the book in the first article, and I'll probably include a link for people to purchase it themselves if they so desire. My blog isn't commercial (not even ads), so I'm not going to be making money off of anyone else's work.

Any thoughts on whether I'm setting myself up for trouble with this?

Cheers

I would treat it as research material, and just cite the source material per article.

Author. Book. Publication Info.

As Windsoar says - just use proper citations. That is 100% legal and normal practice for people writing academic papers, etc.

The format I used last (AHRC format I think, so not one of the most common ones) is Author (s), Title, (Location of publication: Publisher, year)

And when you put quotes in, cite the page number too as a footnote or after in brackets, normally Surname, p. XX so that if you are looking at more than one book you can tell which one it is.

The idea is that if someone wanted to go and look, they could find the book and go to the quote. If you achieve that, its legal. Theres a limit on how much of a book you can reproduce, but if you are just using a few quotes you won't even come close!

Being back in school, yet again, I can echo what has been said above, citation is the key. As long as you reference every piece of material correctly (currently using APA format in this university, I've used MPA format at another university in the past, I prefer APA) you avoid any plagiarism issues and you are, as Windsoar wrote, essentially writing a research paper.

When in doubt, cite everything, just to be on the safe side.

Cheers!

~Ril