I was about to write a post referring to and quoting from an article on the Financial Times website, when I saw this at the bottom:

“Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009. You may share using our article tools. Please don’t cut articles from FT.com and redistribute by email or post to the web.”

The “article tools” include LinkedIn, Facebook and others that I want nothing to do with.

Now I’m not sure whether the FT is okay with bloggers quoting from and linking to their articles, and that they only object to full-text reproduction, but the language is vague enough to deter me (and I presume other bloggers) from doing anything at all.

Which prevents you and other readers from viewing the article in the first place. Which defeats the purpose of making the FT available on a network like the web.

Perhaps the FT will, at some point, make clear what it is comfortable with, and what it isn’t. Without, of course, getting into byzantine legalese.