"Critique" isn't just a vague "something could be construed as critique if you squint hard enough", there needs to be an actual human critiquing something. I see no human here, nor any critiquing text. This would be more like meta-critique, which has no protection I've ever heard of.

Stretching the definition of "fair use" is a favorite internet past time. People have gotten pretty good at it. It isn't anywhere near as flexible as people seem to think, and I mean, like, by a couple orders of magnitude. This particular example isn't even close, honestly.

Yeah, I'm not a lawyer and don't understand 100% of 0.6% being an issue. Copyright holders get to eat their cake and keep it too. Journalists can record and publish phone calls verbatim (Swatch Grp. Mgmt. Servs. Ltd. v. Bloomberg L.P. 742 F.3d 17 (2d Cir. 2014)).

>Stretching the definition of "fair use" is a favorite internet past time.

Absolutely! It's really enjoyabe.

It isn't really 100% of 0.6%... copyright isn't based on byte-count. You may or may not be able to get a straight answer about what it is based on out of the literature, but it's certainly much closer to the human experience rather than the raw byte count. In legal terms, it's basically 100% of 100% of the article being republished. (I'd say it's 100% of 100% if the header image had been included.) Nobody showed up to that page for the 4MB of other stuff, minus the aforementioned header image. Strengthening the case for infringement is that monetary damages are also being experienced, because what is mostly being stripped is the revenue generation portion of the performance of the work.

Basically, if you take the four criteria for something being fair use [1] in the US, which isn't the end-all, be-all of analysis but is a darned good start, this absolutely faceplants on all four. (And while it is technically up to the discretion of the judge, I'd say it's closer to an "AND" than an "OR" on the 4 criteria. You really, really don't want to be standing in front of a judge solid on only one out of four. This is to preclude the usual arguing about #1; even if I grant it, which I don't, it really isn't enough on its own.)

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use

It doesn't face plant on all four (there are no ads in the distillation so it's informational, original work is reporting of speculated facts, it is 0.6% of the whole, and as news orgs are losing money, this lost less money for NG Media than had I visited the original with my ad blocker). There is a strong case for all four. But it seems closeish to Folsom v Marsh:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folsom_v._Marsh

Anyway, courts have seen more outlandish claims - and gone with them (Oracle v Google), so whatever.

That's genius. I doubt a judge would accept this reasoning, but I love it.

Indeed, as intent matters a lot. If the page didn't show the full article but rather just a snippet and then said "This page could have been X while it's actually X", then the intent is just to show the size difference.

But in this case, the intent is to show the full article without anything else, so most likely copyright infringement.

> it's only using 0.6% (0.006) of the original

When you think about it this way it’s clearly fair use.

Usually copyright laws refer to a substantial part of a work, it maybe be 0.6% of the delivered web page, but it's 100% (presumably) of the article. The article counts separately as a work (and each image within an article could count as a separate work, there are conditions on that). But, in any case if all the textual context was copied that's still substantial. Interpreting things in a purely numerical way like that would be clearly ridiculous.

Such gotchas don't work in law in general (in my very limited experience).

Gotchas absolutely do work in this way in law. You just need to be willing to fight it in court.