Depends partly on how long your text is. If they're quoting 50 words from a 1000-word article and then referring to your site for more information, that could be construed as fair use: like a site that quotes the first couple of sentences of a news article and then sends the reader to the original site. If your text is 50 words long and they're using the entire thing, that could be a different thing legally - even then, though, it would probably be on your shoulders (if it went to court) to show some monetary harm. But if the links are doing some good without a measurable down side (is so much of your wording involved that it could cause duplicate content concerns?), why stop it? In fact, if there's a little community posting at the other site, you could do worse than become part of it. How about something along the lines of, "I'm glad you liked my review enough to quote it. Here are some thoughts I'd like to add..." :)

Thanks Beagle

Duplicate content issues are my main concern here.

The snippets are about 50 words from articles of 300-400 words. Is this enough to trigger a duplicate content issue?

What is the extent of the penalty imposed by duplicate content? eg, could it get the copied page excluded from Google's index? Could the existence of duplicate content get other pages from my site excluded (or even my whole site)?

Regards

Marvin

The way I understand it (I'm sure someone will correct this if I'm wrong), calling it a "penalty" is a bit of a misnomer. It's simply that Google only "counts" the content once and ignores it after that. The one thing that would be a concern for you is if someone reposted your content before Google had a chance to spider it on your site, and then Google spiders that second site before it does yours; in that case, it would be likely to consider the same content on your site to be "duplicate" and wouldn't credit you for it. OTOH, if Google finds it first on your site, it should consider the second one a copy and not index it.

It would seem to me that 50 words out of 300-400 is a pretty hefty amount. It would be like someone quoting 100 pages of a 600-page book in a book review. But that's just talking about fair use - I have no idea how the search engines would treat it.

Actually, in my country it is not illegal or an infringement on anybodys works to quote them contextually as in a review, or a study or anything else - if they are quoted appropriately. *quote on the internet would be a link to the original source of information.

There is no copyright on facts or ideas either. If you have a fact or a definition which is widely accepted - then you are free to use it on an as-is basis. It will have to be a "substantial creative work" if it were to claim any "copyright" on anything.

Laws are different from country to country - it would all depend on where the server of the website is located which stores the information.

Sincerely, and have fun,