IANAL, but here's my understanding of the DMCA's Safe Harbour provision, which is why scribd and other UGC sites (e.g. YouTube, isohunt, flickr) aren't held res

IANAL, but here's my understanding of the DMCA's Safe Harbour provision, which is why scribd and other UGC sites (e.g. YouTube, isohunt, flickr) aren't held responsible for copyrighted material appearing on their sites. UGC websites can be protected by the Safe Harbour provision under the following conditions: - The site provides a legal, legitimate service (i.e. fair use) - The amount of UGC on the site is too much to reasonably police - They have an employee registered with the US govt as the agent for handling all copyright claims. Simply providing an email address, contact form, or even a mailing address doesn't count. - When they receive legitimate removal requests from the copyright holders they remove the content in a timely manner. As long as these conditions are met they can't be held liable for copyright violations which occur through the use of their product. HN is a different case, because the amount of content copied from the source site (the headline, and only in some cases) is a small portion of the original work. Furthermore, HN is adding value to the content through ranking and community, which makes it a distinct piece of intellectual property. Similarly, you can legally make a collage which contains copyrighted material because the collage itself is a distinct entity (more than the sum of its parts). How much of the page content can scraped and presented, or how large the pieces of a collage can be, is vividly debated. For me personally, its a bit of a Potter Stewart situation, and this feed is absolutely copyright infringement.