Just a heads-up guys, we've had to delete a couple of FanPosts over the last week for cutting-and-pasting articles in their entirety into a FanPost.  This is a problem that pops up fairly frequently on AP.

The material that you'll see on ESPN or the Kansas City Star or Pro Football Talk is copyrighted material and as such cutting-and-pasting an entire article into a FanPost represents a copyright violation both on your part and Arrowhead Pride's (if we leave it up once we recognize the violation).  Granted, the majority of the news we're going to get here is from other sites, and it's fine to link to most of those sites and cut and paste excerpts from what they wrote (clearly labeled as quotes) interspersed with your own commentary (except in the case of subscriber info, which I'll get to in a bit).  But you can't just cut-and-paste the entire article into a FanPost.  Doing so requires us to immediately delete the article to prevent the site from getting into trouble.  Also, if you quote an article in your FanPost, you need to provide a link back to the original article as well for proper attribution.

There is also the issue of subscriber-only info (ESPN Insider, Scouts, Inc., Warpaint Illustrated).  You can provide a link to these articles, but you cannot provide excerpts from it in a FanPost...and you must provide a link to that article if you refer to it at all.  Basically, if the article requires a password or subscription to access, you can't take anything from it and you're probably best off not even doing a FanPost on it if that's your primary source of information (although hyper-linking to it in a story from another source is usually fine, as long as you don't lift and reprint material from that article).  Even providing a full recap of what the article said in a FanPost in your own words is pretty sketchy and could cause us problems, so don't try to push the boundaries of copyright violation...the overwhelming majority of us aren't lawyers and aren't familiar with copyright law, so if there's any question about whether or not an article is okay to use, you probably need to err on the side of caution and not use it.

Again, this is just a heads-up and I'm not trying to single anyone out...the overwhelming majority of you guys understand the rules and do a good job of policing your own work to prevent this sort of thing.  And most of the people who do cross the line do so unintentionally.  But it's up to all of us to insure that we keep the site out of trouble with regards to copyright infringement so we have a place to come and discuss Chiefs info so your help and compliance are greatly appreciated.

Thanks.