If you're referring to the legal "fair use" doctrine, that's not quite how it works. There are four standards to determine whether something is fair use, and one of them is "The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole."

As far as providing a link -- that's polite, and much appreciated. But not enough, according to the U.S. Copyright Office; "Acknowledging the source of the copyrighted material does not substitute for obtaining permission."

http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl102.html

Lest anyone misunderstand, I'm not the enforcer of The Plain Dealer's copyright. But legal questions aside, I think it's just polite to use only a small part of someone else's work. That's why when I've linked from cleveland.com to RealNEO posts in the past, I've tried to use just a small part of a post, so that the original poster and the site get (we hope) the benefit of people clicking to read the whole thing.

The Plain Dealer and cleveland.com have, in fact, begun a new emphasis on using our large audience to send people to the many informative and creative blogs around Northeast Ohio. You'll be hearing even more about that in weeks to come. And when we do that, we'll be careful to follow fair-use guidelines and our own sense of what's right. If we do take too much of someone's work, I hope someone will let me know (jkroll [at] plaind [dot] com) so I can get that fixed.

John Kroll

Director of Training and Digital Development

The Plain Dealer

 Not rhetorical. 

Mark Puente wrote and posted that story on cleveland.com. And he carried on a conversation with the users on that site, responding to their questions and comments. 

By copying the whole story, even if you credit and link to him, you're making it unlikely that those who find the story on RealNEO will go to cleveland.com to read it and respond to Mark there. That's not doing much to reward Mark for his reporting or The Plain Dealer and cleveland.com for supporting it. Realize that posting something on RealNEO, or any other blog, isn't like telling it to a friend or mailing it to your aunt. Instead, you're making it available to the whole online world.

If you quote a portion of his story -- a few paragraphs, say, given the length of this particular story -- you still give your readers enough context to discuss it on RealNEO, if they wish. But you also whet their appetite to read the whole thing where Mark originally posted it. And you send them to the site that's part of the company that pays the salary that allows Puente to devote his energy to tracking down stories like that. Money aside, it means more clicks and comments for his story, and that's the currency of the Internet.

Even for sites where advertising's not involved, someone who goes to the trouble of writing an original, interesting post deserves to have traffic sent their way, rather than having that post appropriated to pull traffic toward another site that didn't put in the effort.

And there is the law to consider. When you copied Puente's story, you included the copyright information at the bottom. That's not just a credit; it's a legal notice that The Plain Dealer and cleveland.com retain the rights to that content. The New York Times, the Lake County News-Herald, Cleveland Scene -- they all do the same.

In the broader discussion that Mr. Roulet called for, that's something RealNEO posters should consider. Aggregation -- sharing the best of online journalism and commentary with your readers -- is a great thing, and it complements the original posts on this site. Reproducing another site's work entirely, without prior permission, is not.