Copyright laws are difficult to understand, but perhaps a simple explanation would suffice in this instance. Let's take newspapers for example. Today, most daily newspapers are granted blanket copyright protection on an entire edition rather than on individual articles and photographs. Backing up a little for prospective, understand that just saying something is copyrighted has no legal standing until application is made with the Library Of Congress and fees paid that allows the use of the copyright symbol. For a newspaper to be granted this exclusive privilege -- once approved for blanket coverage under the U.S. copyright laws -- there is an arduous process whereby whole copies of each edition are submitted to the LOC monthly for recording the process by volume and issue -- and thus allowing the entire contents within that framework to be protected. Years ago, newspapers individually submitted individual enterprise pieces of investigative journalism for protection from re-use by other forms of publications like magazines, books, etc. -- mostly printed media. Each copyright required an individual fee be accompanied with a file-able copy of an important story. It was a cumbersome process. In order for another newspaper to use the copyright material, usually permission was granted another newspaper in a courtesy letter requesting use of the material. Sometimes, the material was allowed to be used with attribution or other times if the requester paid an agreed fee for the privilege of using the content. Because the fees required to copyright individual story content were so high, only the larger metro daily newspapers subscribed to the idea. Smaller outlets very seldom had breaking or investigative material and they were happy with allowing others access on an attribution-only basis. That was in the printed world, and when electronic journalism grabbed a foot-hold on reporting practices with the invention of the internet, the landscape changed. Several internet sites scraped content from the web and published it with attribution. That was okay at first, but when newspapers learned that these sites were profiting on content paid for by the newspapers, the situation changed and challenges started to protest the use of this content without monetary reimbursement. Why you ask? Because, these newspapers found they could sell their content to reference services on a contractual basis and these firms started offering the content on a subscription basis finding large libraries across this country and abroad willing to pay for the content to resell it. Then someone came up with idea to sell the archives of major newspapers by turning over the newspaper's library to be scanned electronically because the content was printed paper-based rather than electronic back then. Years of early publications were sold for huge sums so they could be added for research companies expanding data bases that are being sold today. Remember, I am only talking about newspapers since I personally was involved with contracting to digitize volumes of newspaper editions that were sent to sweat shops out of this country where cheaply paid labor recreated the stories one at time and migrated them into huge databases. Newspapers realized a huge incentive to let someone else sell their archived content and just get a royalty on each article or photo accessed by a researcher who paid the data base company a fee -- either on a per article basis or a monthly or yearly subscription.
Also, content inside a newspaper like syndicated material -- usually comics, columns and specialty content is individually copyrighted for the authors by the syndicates. (i.e. King Features, NY Times News Service, etc). Usually, permission can be granted to use this by sending a letter to the syndicate through the publishing newspaper. In some cases, permission can be extended at the local level on most of these nationally distributed creative works. Where people get in trouble with copyright laws is using it without permission and offering the content in any form that requires the person accessing it to pay a fee. Usually non-profit distribution with attribution is sufficient, but if the protected content is included where money changes hands for the material then you can expect the copyright holder to seek compensation for illegal use. In other words, quite a bit of money has gone into the process on their part and they will pick and choose what compensation they are due based on the totality of the potential revenue. Hope this helps.