What makemoneyonline was telling was correct. Anybody who wants to sue you will first of think whether it is going to be any profitable task. If you are really making a lot of money from the copied or rewritten content then only there are high chances of sueing. For general writing and including a link to the original article should not create problems especially if you earn only some thousand dollars a month.

Depends onhow the article is copyrighted..

There are All RIghts reserved as well as some rights reserved...

Here is a link to the Library of Congress' website on copyright law.
http://www.copyright.gov/

As a professional writer, I have a few concerns. First, if someone used any of my work without permission, I would sue, regardless of whether I expect to receive compensation. A lawsuit can also make the user remove the information or otherwise stop using it, which may be enough for me, or any other writer, to sue.

Secondly, when you use someone else's work, you are accepting it at face value. Do you know if the information is accurate? Do you understand the information well enough to rewrite it and not create an error in the information? I have interviewed a lot of people and there are times when I repeat what they have told me as I understand it only to have them tell me what I have said is not quite the same as what they said.

Something that happened several years ago comes to mind. A woman who was working on her master's thesis at Harvard or Yale or one of those Ivy League colleges used material she got from a website. The website turned out to contain lots of information presented as fact that was basically made up stuff from a delusional person.

I would hesitate to use work I couldn't vouch for, especially if I had no way to determine reliability of the source.

To those who say it's okay if you don't get caught or if you reword -

Tell me you're kidding. So, if I were to say take your website design verbatim and just change the links to suit my needs, that would be okay, too? Come on, guys. You can't believe it's okay, can you?

One need look only to the incident where the Harvard grad was publicly embarrassed, had to pay back her advance on her book and was basically drummed out of publishing all for having a few passages in her book similar or identical to another's book. Think the other author didn't think it was a waste of time to sue?

Let's put it this way - if it were my writing that was being "modified" or copied verbatim, you bet I'd sue. It costs all of 30 bucks to file in small claims court.

To answer the original poster, if you can easily recognize it as another article and you haven't attributed to that author, it's illegal. Fair use laws do allow you to quote a portion of another work, but it limits the amount you're able to quote.

A possible solution might be to contact the author and find out if it's okay to present that article on your site as an "as written by" attribution. You may have to pay a reprint charge, but it's the safest, least expensive way for you. Also, the copyright may belong to another - such as a magazine or website - and those entities may have no problem suing should their copyrights be infringed upon.

Hi Technoguy -

I wanted to address this very important question. Short answer - yes. No matter where that article appears, it would be illegal to replicate it without the permission of the copyright owner. Say you made a bells-and-whistles site for IBM. You busted your hump for months and you made a damn fine site that no one else has. Now imagine someone comes along - a writer, perhaps - who doesn't want to pay someone to design a new website for him. So he sees your site at IBM and decides it's exactly what he wants.

Think IBM is going to look the other way? Would you be happy that your work was being replicated without your permission, nor without payment?

I'm not trying to offend, but sometimes it's easier to see the situation from the other side.

So in short I must for unique content rather than rewriting. But I can rewrite the articles if I have a permission of the author.

I think for this we would have to pay ,than what we can get.I have some articles ,so I think its easy.But it is not legal.so better to take the permission .

Article rewriting is only legal in the sense that you accquired permisson from the original author. You could rewrite an entire article in your own words. But without the proper sourcing and such it becomes illegal.

Well original article writers are making a nice amount of money these days. But now a days i have not seen anyone taking any legal action against any other website for copyright infringement.

I believe that there is no harm in re-writing an article as long as its re-written in a manner with plagiarism rules in mind. Its hard to write articles totally on your own depending on the genre as not all of us are journalists to gather information and write on our own.