Is the concept of a magazine article copyrightable, or just the text?

Question

I want to start a business digest magazine. I would like to rewrite articiles form magazines and put them in my magazine. I won't use any of the text (I will rewrite everything) but I will be using the concept of the article. Will I be violating the copyright of the magazine from which I rewrite the article?

Answer 1

Hahaha. Well, clearly you didn't learn much about plagiarism when you were in college. I guess you just didn't get caught. Of course, if you do rewrite everything, anyone will tell you that getting caught it very uncommon.

There's a fine line here. If you're just re-writing or re-phrasing the whole article paragraph by paragraph, you've effectively copied it, and while it might be difficult to prove, you HAVE plagiarized the article. On the other hand, article concepts are not really something that anyone has ownership over. Imagine if they did. Once I wrote about something, no one else could ever write about that topic again...what a world that would be!

So, basically, if you're just rewriting articles directly, yeah, that would be a problem. On the other hand, if you're doing original writing, and just getting ideas from other places, I don't think that's particularly restricted. How do you draw the line between those two? Ah, that's where it gets tricky.