Duped from the South Africa thread:

Which would you rather have:
1) A flyertalk where copyrighted material is not posted?

or

2) No flyertalk at all because Randy has his pants sued off of him?

It's just sooooooo easy to provide a link to yahoo or msnbc or any of the thousand other non-subscription news sources without violating any U.S. federal laws that I cannot understand why anyone would want to jeopardize the whole forum for the sake of saving one click on a hotlink. I find that attitude wantonly selfish. And if the news service is not free, then you're REALLY asking for trouble by reprinting it here or anywhere else!!!

As someone who has had to (sucessfully) pursue copyright violations of my work (ok, so it was my employer's copyright of my work, but I still took it personally), this is a pretty sensitive topic to me, too.

As my copyright attorney says: Speech is free in America so long as they are your words. If not, be prepared to pay. (I suggested he put that on his business card, he declined )