"Comcast News" wrote in message news:v5SRc.119596$eM2.57261@attbi_s51...
It has been held up in court, many times. It is illegal to copy a published
article and then republish it in any format. Now the odds of you being
charged with theft of intellectual property is very slim, but if you only
obey laws because you feel their is a high probability of being prosecuted,
than you can probably download music and videos online, and copy someone
else's articles and republish them in rec.boats without losing a lot of
sleep.

Perhaps, instead of someone's hypothesis, we should go right to the
source:
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998

Copyright Office Summary December 1998 Page 3
Registration as a Prerequisite to Suit
The remaining technical amendment relates to the prohibition in both
treaties
against conditioning the exercise or enjoyment of rights on the
fulfillment of
formalities. Section 411(a) of the Copyright Act requires claims to
copyright to be
registered with the Copyright Office before a lawsuit can be initiated
by the copyright
owner, but exempts many foreign works in order to comply with existing
treaty
obligations under the Berne Convention. Section 102(d) of the DMCA
amends section
411(a) by broadening the exemption to cover all foreign works.

Now, granted, this IS cut from a website, but it is law.