How do spells work in D&D Essentials Starter kit?
I've seen some answers rolled back because the copyright wasn't owned. Ultimately all one would do to go around this example, though, would be to type out the relevant line -- still copying the information although less of it (probably).
Related to Links to "D&D Tools" / dndtools.eu and similar sites in the sense that we're facing the same issue in a different way (which I'm still seeing plenty of links to that source).
While copyright issues on sites like StackExchange are always thorny because of the international audience, the copyright laws I'm familiar with include provisions for Fair Use, which include criticism, commentary or teaching - which I think most questions on RPG.SE fall under. As Joshua Aslan Smith says, as long as you're only quoting the specific bits you're asking about, it's probably reasonable.
A somewhat different issue, however, is whether it is whether posting the images of the power cards falls under Fair Use. Personally, I believe that as long as the question is about the power and not the card, posting the image isn't justified when the text alone would suffice, and be more search engine- and accessiblity-friendly to boot.
Images that we might want to use here are almost always going to be copyright violations that have no Fair Use protection, since using an image simply as an informational reference isn't protected by Fair Use. Other transformative uses like parody, that are protected, just don't apply to our site.
As a rule of thumb, quoting a complete "item" is going beyond Fair Use, because it no longer requires the reader to have access to a legit copy in order to use it and benefit financially (by not having to buy the book/subscription). Such uses are very unlikely to be covered by Fair Use since they are more than necessary. A quote should always be the very minimum necessary for clarity. Generally, it can be assumed that both asker and answerer have access to the text and should use citations to refer to it, to avoid quoting anything. When quoting is absolutely necessary to make it clear what is being discussed, a very small extract is all that is "necessary".
This only applies to copyrighted material that we can't use under license, of course.
