What do you call it when newspaper columnists use a blogger's photo without permission?
By adamg - 6/2/09 - 8:06 am
We hear from a reliable source that a couple of gossip gals at a certain scrappy tabloid got caught passing off a two-year-old photo of the Celtics dancers as their own when it was really taken by a local blogger - who was never asked if that was OK. File under: Tsk.
Comments
To answer your question,
By Turner (not verified) - 6/2/09 - 8:58 am
To answer your question, it's either called Good Internet Research or Plagiarism.
I call use without permission and attribution a mistake
By neilv - 6/2/09 - 9:06 am
But it's not clear to me that they were trying to pass it off as their own. And the heading is "Tracked Down:". They might not have even known who the photog was. I didn't see that on the blogger's original page.
That said, if things are as they appear, I'd say the blogger is due an apology and offer of a healthy (retroactive) use fee.
Random blogs pilfer all the time, but media companies can't.
I'm betting the gals didn't even see the photo
By adamg - 6/2/09 - 9:16 am
Still, you'd like to think that people who earn their living thanks to copyright, even if just a lowly researcher, would know a bit better.
I think what triggered Mats was the photo cutline, which identifies the photo as a "file" photo.
But it was a file photo
By zbert - 6/2/09 - 9:24 am
... a JPEG file!
I've seen news CMS systems...
By neilv - 6/2/09 - 9:33 am
...do all sorts of funny things with cutlines. It's a software problem, and their software tends of be duct-taped together.
I once was a dork who emailed the editor because a paper's system somehow lost my photo credit on a subsequent publication of an image that I'd licensed to them earlier. That would've been highly unlikely in a well-designed and -implemented system. They were still working the kinks out of some new software, and they fixed it immediately.
Anyway, he has a right to be miffed, but this is probably just a couple small accidents, not them being jerks.
CMS systems are great
By adamg - 6/2/09 - 9:38 am
When every piece of content is exactly the same. It was amazing how long the basic content-submission form in our system got after a few years of constant additions of checkboxes and dropdowns to take into account the ever growing list of exceptions to all the rules (one of the things I kept pushing for was an overhaul of that page, but then I stopped and now it's not my problem).
So, yeah, I'm betting the Herald CMS, the one that routinely manages to split stories so that the second page consists of exactly one sentence, probably has a rule that goes something like: "if photo_attribution == null then print 'File'".
It may not just be the CMS
By langmead - 6/2/09 - 1:10 pm
I worked on building a CMS and we went through great lengths to make sure that content could be reused, expired, etc. There was little reason to copy around photos, stories, etc. Too often though, there would be multiple copies of the same photos or stories put in by (the same or different) news producers at different times. An attribution probably wouldn't have been lost like that within the system, but if someone saved a copy outside the CMS and inserted a new copy the potential for mistake could happen each time.
I guess the real failing here was that the system that we built didn't match the workflow the business needed. My best excuse can be that the business probably changed faster than the system being developed to support it.
Workflow?
By adamg - 6/2/09 - 2:11 pm
Isn't that something end users do their darndest to get around? :-).
When we were designing our CMS workflow, we tried to account for every possible case - and wound up with a chart that needed three separate sheets, lengthwise, to accommodate all the possible transitions (in part to mirror our print workflow at the time).
And when we realized what we'd done, we scrapped the whole thing and went to a three-step process (basically, draft, in process and published, with an emergency unpublish state for stuff we had to take down right this second).
Problem here is, what are
By ShadyMilkMan - 6/2/09 - 2:12 pm
Problem here is, what are the chances that they meant to credit the photo properly??? Does the inside track make a habit of giving royalties to random bloggers tey obviously do not know?
I think it is especially funny, because if this were some other major media publication the catty girls over at the track would have printed the side by sides...
two different problems
By langmead - 6/2/09 - 4:18 pm
There are two different problems here:
The first one is the more serious problem and I don't have any excuse or reason for it to happen; but I'm not a journalist or intellectual property attorney and I don't have much to say on it. The second one is personally amusing to me because I've developed CMS software and love to hear where they succeed and fail. Its not the important part of the story, its just the part I know.