Well the other thing that irks me is that we've been told previously that we are allowed to post insider info on this board, so long as we don't copy and paste exact word for word stories. That's what was said last time this happened.
That's not -- at all -- what the guidelines say. We explicitly laid them out to avoid this sort of thing.
But that doesn't appear to be what dwshade did. My reading of Lax's initial post was that he was restating information he had picked up elsewhere.
It was so bad he literally had multiple posts in a singular thread that were pointed out to me by writers on a premium site where he did exactly what we asked him not to and had warned him not to. He's been a serial offender with tons of warnings and tons of second chances because of his tenure here and the fact that he's well liked.
You cannot just go rip shit from behind paywall without attribution. Even if we could win that case in court, it's obviously not ethical. What we ask people to do is not hard... if you're literally grabbing something from someone's site, post a link and attribute it. NDCrusader posts TONS of stuff and always seems to follow simple, basic guidelines.
And to be clear, it's sure as hell not "legal" in most cases to share content from behind a paywall. For example, a protected scholarly article where someone summarizes the whole thing and gives the content away to everyone is almost certainly breaking the law. It does not matter if they copy and pasted it or changed a couple words while still relaying all of the content. ESPN has won cases against people who do things like take Mel Kiper's big board and say "Mel Kiper's first round was XYZ"... what IS legal is writing "commentary" of any sort on paywall content with attribution. For example, if you write "Mel Kiper issued a new big board, and it has Quenton Nelson going in the top 5. (LINK) That'd be really great for Q to be one of the highest drafted guards ever!" that'd fine.
In short, just follow the fucking directions. They aren't hard to follow. If someone is too lazy or stupid to follow simple directions (and multiple warnings) then they shouldn't be posting here. We're not going to jeopardize the site at large for someone's laziness. We're not going to go to war with a bunch hard working professionals for someone's laziness.
