Citing whole mailing list messages on the web
<p>When I cite a complete message from a mailing list, omitting all personal information, if any, that is relatively concise (“Hi”, definition of problem, question, “Thank You”), can I cite the message publicly on a website?</p>
<p>The message is a question related to computing and I cite the it because I answer it in the page.</p>
<p>The mailing list has publicly available archives.</p>
<p>Do I need consent of the original author to cite the message? Can I infringe copyright by embedding the whole message text on the page? (Assuming that the person did not give me any kind of permission explicitly.)</p>

<p>First, copyright means that permission from the author is generally required. The courts find three sorts of such permission: direct author-to-recipient explicit licensing (typical in the case of a book author to publisher relation), indirect licensing arising from platform usage (in using Stackexchange, you probably unknowingly click-agreed to allow me and everybody else to copy and redistribute your creations), and implicit licensing – where permission to use is reasonably inferrable, though not explicitly stated. Since the latter doesn't involve written-out statements of the conditions under which you are licensed to copy text, the courts don't rely heavily on implicit licensing. But implicit licensing is what makes it possible to legally read a web page without first signing an agreement. If we assume in your scenario that the author is fully aware that their responses are automatically distributed to various servers, then even in lieu of a platform license, an implicit license can be found.</p>
<p>Second, irrespective of the desideratum of having permission, one is in the US allowed to copy without permission, for certain purposes known as <a href="https://law.stackexchange.com/tags/fair-use/info">&quot;fair use&quot;</a>. This is a complicated area of legal analysis, where one has to weigh factors such as whether the content is artistic vs. factual, whether your use simply re-propagates vs. makes a comment, whether the use is for profit vs. free and educational, and whether the use has a negative effect on the market for the original work.</p>

<h2>You can't delete all personal information</h2>
<p>Take this answer for example. If you were to copy just the text omitting my user ID, your user ID and the dates etc. <strong>it's still personal information!</strong> A simple Google search will bring you back here and voila - you will have my user ID. Personal information is <em>any</em> information that can be linked to a particular person. So the text of this answer is irrevokably PII of both you and me, just like the text of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets is PII of J. K. Rowling.</p>
<p>So, if you do this where PII is subject to privacy laws, you have to comply with those laws.</p>
<h2>Copyright</h2>
<p>You don't own the copyright in what you are copying, therefore you need permission or a fair use/dealing defence.</p>
<p>For this answer, you have a <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/legal/terms-of-service#licensing">licence</a> for personal but not commercial use:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>You may download or copy the public Network Content, and other items displayed on the public Network for download or personal use provided that you maintain all copyright and other notices contained in such Public Content.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>While the licence requires you to include all copyright information, it does not require you to cite or otherwise acknowledge the author.</p>
<p>Other sites will have other rules.</p>

copyright internet email attribution