A journalist's view on your situation -

Remember the hack's maxim - copy from one source and it's plagiarism. Copy from two and it's research.

If you just cut and paste copy from other sources, you will soon be hearing from lawyers. But you can of course draw facts from one or more stories on a subject, rewrite the story around them and put them out - there is no copyright on facts, only how they're presented. Always try and double-check the facts, however, otherwise you run the risk of repeating incorrect facts, which could land you with libel proceedings. The best thing to do depends on what you want your newsletter to do. One possibility may be to just include a short synopses of articles you've seen elsewhere and provide a link to the original source. If you want to something more involved, employ a journalist. They're the professionals, and much cheaper than IT sorts.

As a journalist this strikes at the heart of many problems I and my fellow hacks currently face.

I'd be extremely surprised if you can buy much in the way of copyright for £250. Work produced by freelance journalists remains their copyright, not that of the magazine (not quite as simple as that, but, in short, the mag rarely has the right to re-sell stuff) and hacks need to make a living.  The average rate of pay for a decent journalist working in the trade media is £250-300 per thousand words, assuming your Net stuff will be, at most, 700 words that's going to cost you a minimum of £175. Reading articles, taking the idea and writing your own piece is allowed but, beware of making a habit of this. If people can see stuff you've written elsewhere, produced by professional journalists (I'm assuming by the nature of your question, you're not. Apologies if you are) then they'll quickly kick your newsletter into touch. And, on the subject of quotes: yes, you can lift quotes directly from other pieces - but I wouldn't make a habit of it. If you do it once or twice, nobody minds, but if you do it (without ever naming the original source) on a regular basis, expect to find you ass slapped with a copyright infringement notice - and paying in the region of twice as much as you would have paid to purchase the original article.

There are literally thousands of free newsletters available on the Net, what can you do to make yours different? Maybe you need to take a different slant; tackle a topic that isn't covered; or provide a value-added service that will differentiate you.  Someone else has suggested getting people to write for free - with their by-line and a hyperlink as the only remuneration. That's great in practice but you need a professional editor to ensure that all copy is well-written, tight, relevant and not simply puffery for their business. Although everyone can write, writing to interest others is a skill. Writing for the Internet is even harder.  And, yes, everyone can have original material. Taking material from a collection of different sources and re-printing them (a la "Reader's Digest) is expensive. And if it's not expensive, it's theft.  So, in my opinion Steve, either pay someone to edit stuff and get "names in industries" to produce material for you (you have to, I can't build widgets, so why should a widget builder be able to write a feature article?). Alternatively, speak to those that have written pieces you like and ask for permission to reproduce a précis of their piece (which you will have to produce your self, and probably check with them). Some people may be happy for this to happen for free, because of exposure they might receive - and paying work afterwards.

The general idea is not subject to copyright.  Therefore you are free to poach ideas for articles.  The articles themselves, however, must not be 'copied.'  Do not use the original with only slight amends and think you will get away with it.  Be very careful of lifting quotes as well.  You can contact the person quoted and get your own quote from them, but don't ever change the original quotes as you will get into even deeper trouble. You can always pay a journalist to write some original stuff for you which would work out cheaper than buying the copyright on material.  You could just link to articles contained in a publication's web site which would bring them hits and save you a lot of time. Either way, you have to weigh up whether you are time poor and cash rich or vice versa when coming to a decision as there will be no bigger turn off for you mailing list than a badly researched and poorly written newsletter.

I think you may be approaching this issue from the wrong angle. There are many email distributed newsletters that feature articles written by people in the industry and those people give their articles for free or at least in return for exposure to their audience. See http://www.internetday.com/  for example.

If you can find/write some articles to get the ball rolling you may well find that your subscriber base supplies you with all the articles you could ever want. I'm not suggesting it's easy as you obviously need a good circulation of your newsletter before people will value it as a means of self-promotion. Chicken and egg-type stuff I suppose, but it shouldn't stop you trying.

You cannot copyright an idea; what is copyrighted is the implementation of the idea - the words and diagrams and layout in an article, or the design and product in a patent. So, if you think 'Hmmm....I'd like to use an article on Bogles' after reading one you can either cough up reproduction rights OR you can research and write your own OR you can commission someone else to write a piece for you.  If you research your own, get two or three articles, read them, add your own slant, find out an extra fact - there - you've researched an original piece.  Cross check statistics and facts because people are known to put 'bum' information in articles to catch people who are plagiarising them - i.e. re-writing the piece without further effort.