Bloggy peeps,

Anyone know if there is a general rule on the acceptability (copyright, etc.) for using published data to recreate a figure for a blog post? I'm asking because I'd like to incorporate a figure from an old manuscript in a blog post. The figure in the paper is of very poor quality, so I've reproduced it (extracted and replotted the data) for the purposes of a blog post. After doing this, it occurred to me that I didn't know if this is OK or not.

Your input appreciated.

I think Brian is exactly right. You may want to shoot Scicurious an email, she does this all the time!

I copy and paste images from research papers all the time, and include a citation at the end of the post. (Or, if the image is from a paper other than the one i'm discussing, I'll cite it in the photo caption). So if you're extracting the data and re-making the image, you're totally cool. Just cite the paper. I've never received any email or anything asking me to remove images or graphs (and I often email paper authors to let them know i've blogged their papers).

Many thanks for the info everyone! Appreciate it.

The NFL pulled this kind of shit too.  There was a huge case about it a while back and the ACLU got involved.  Basically, someone was showing her class clips from football games she posted on YouTube.  Because she was using the videos to teach a class, the NFL was embarassed and she got to keep showing the videos.  As far as I understand the law, the cases where you can invoke fair use are when an item is used for teaching/explanation or it's part of a piece of satire.  As long as you credit the copyright holder, they can't do a whole hell of a lot other than make a smoke and mirrors stink about it.

Brian, true but those stinks with smoke and mirrors can be played out in court for awhile, forcing the target to pony up time and money in the process.  Sure, they'll more than likely get the decision reversed and force the publishers to pay court fees, but who wants to tackle that 800 pound gorilla?