James is one of the more respected writers (he's actually a member of the Football Writers Association of America) and has been doing this for a long time. I think he was just trying to let you know to simply be careful of how much you copy/paste into your site because a simple link attribution isn't necessarily enough to avoid a copyright issue.
I can tell you first hand having been at this for 12+ years that as your site gets more popular, you've got to be careful. I've gotten calls at home due to people doing it on the board, which is why I posted this link: (
http://www.patsfans.com/new-england.../319672-copyrighted-material-please-read.html). People spend a lot of time researching stuff before posting it, and I can tell you I've had a couple of blog posts that people cut and pasted onto their own site, and some of the stats I used in that entry took me hours to compile. So it was irritating because those people weren't coming to my blog to read it, as well as potentially other entries.
If you're just aggregating content and you're not doing it in such a way for users to be enticed to go to the original site to read the entire report, forget Google rankings, you're essentially stealing page views, impressions, etc. which hurts their ad revenue. No one likes working hard to produce stuff for free while relying on ad revenue to cover their time, only to lose the referrals because someone is just pasting it on their own site.
So count me as someone else who is also just telling you to be careful, because the bigger and more popular your site may continue to get, you don't want to run into an issue where you have to completely edit 100's of reports due to someone sending you a FedEx from a legal office - or worse, having the site shut down .
Ian