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I noticed that all the "summaries" in Yahoo News Digest are simply pieces of articles copied and pasted from another website. Isn't this violating the copyright of the real article?

EDIT: If I am not wrong, the app was first created by a teenager who wrote a script which automatically made the summary of any article. Assuming that he wasn't able to pay the newspapers for replying all the articles on the app and also that the script simply took some paragraphs from the article without changing any word, how was it possible for him not to infringe the copyright?

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It is unlikely that they are massively violating copyright law, which would be quite expensive for them. Copyright law says that one cannot copy without permission of the rights-holder. Many news services, such as AP, sell that right to copy, and it is reasonable to assume that some amount of what they distribute is because they paid for it. Copyright protection protects "expression", not facts: it is also possible that a digest article draws on facts reported elsewhere, but completely written by Yahoo staff (changing a few words does not overcome copyright protection). Yahoo has no obligation to publicly advertise the nature of their licensing agreements with others, so it may not be obvious that they have permission.

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