Fellow Nature Network blogger Richard Grant has recently had a unnerving experience. He has come across a website whose sole contents appear to be copies of his blog entries without any attribution or links back to Richard’s blog. It’s pure passing off.
Now, wonderful though Net 2.0 and all the ability to make your own stuff is, it doesn’t take away the rights of others. Though it’s normally accepted practice to syndicate a blog – host a copy of someone else’s blog on your site – it has to be with appropriate attributions and links. That way you’re spreading their work to a wider readership, not passing it off as your own. Anything else is theft, pure and simple.
A more subtle form of this theft has been undertaken by some British newspapers. I know of several bloggers who have discovered whole posts from their blogs reprinted in a national newspaper without permission or payment.
Even though the paper(s) in question did acknowledge the author and their blog address, this is still in breach of copyright. It’s fine to quote part of a blog entry to make a point or review it, but it isn’t acceptable to copy a post wholesale without the author’s permission.
No doubt the newspaper(s) in question thought that the poor little blogger would be happy to have their words in a real newspaper. But this misses the point. If their writing was considered good enough to be published, they should have been paid for it. I believe more than one blogger has now slammed an invoice in on the newspaper(s) and had them paid without question. But this doesn’t make the original action any more acceptable.
It’s blognapping, pure and simple.
It means their journalists aren’t worth the money if they can’t even write on their own.
Speaking of copies, what I would really like to see is the removal of redundant information on search engines. If one searches for some piece of information you are likely to find a newspaper article on top, and then there’s 50 echos of the same text or snippets of that text in other newspapers, online magazines, blogs etc that don’t add a single piece of information. If anything, they even leave out sources or misinterpret the original article. Who needs that? I am reasonably sure that people deliberately copy articles about topics and keywords that are likely to score high in the search engine referrals. But if they do so by cheaply copying a previous article this doesn’t create anything than artificial hypes (if many people write about it it must be interesting, so more people think it’s interesting etc). Repeating is cheap, adding information isn’t, and I’d think the latter should be more important than the former.
Why is it breach of copyright to have posts reproduced in national newspapers? It has happened to me (my personal blog, not my work ones) several times – but I’ve been attributed each time. As I don’t licence or copyright the content of my personal blog, I assume that the newspaper concerned is within its rights in reproducing content?
In my particular case, I am happy for the newspaper to feature my posts, as my blog is purely a hobby and for me it is nice to have a potentially wider readership.
However, I know that other bloggers have got very cross when they have discovered newspapers doing this. One wrote that she sent a bill to the Daily Mail when she found them reproducing her content, and they paid.
However, if you write a blog and don’t licence or copyright the content, I was not aware that there is any legal recourse to stop other publications reproducing it (with attribution)? Would be very grateful if you could pass on any knowledge you have on this topic, Brian.
Maxine – as far as I am aware, under copyright law there is no need to take any action to hold copyright on something you write- it is yours unless you explicitly licence it to someone else.
A blog entry is just as much under your copyright as anything else you write. For someone else to reproduce it whole, they must seek permission and pay any agreed fee.
It’s fine for you to be happy for a newspaper to copy your blog, but it’s not fine for them to assume this – they need to obtain permission.
Things are more grey over small parts of the text, quoted to illustrate a point or as a review – such fair usage is generally accepted, and would be hard to contest, though as I understand it, its legal position is not 100% solid.
Thanks, Brian – useful to know. They usually quote a few paragraphs, so I’m a grey area it seems.
Here’s a precis (not a copy!) of some of the points from a booklet on copyright produced for authors by Pearson:
Copyright law prohibits reproduction of ‘substantial’ quotations (see Fair Dealing below) of any text during the author’s lifetime and for 70 years after the author dies.
There is no need to register text for copyright, or to show a copyright statement (such as © Brian Clegg 2008) – copyright exists from the moment the text is created.
Fair dealing/Fair use:
Because of an agreement between the Society of Authors and the Publishers’ Association, extracts not exceeding certain limits may be quoted permission, provided that acknowledgement to author and source is made either in the text or in a footnote. The limits under which material may be taken as ‘fair dealing’ are:
Song lyrics, material used in anthologies, material which has been adapted in any way from the original or an extract that is a complete in itself (e.g. a 300 word article) may not be used.
However, fair dealing is not contained in copyright law, and the use of it may be challenged by the copyright holder(s).
Thanks, Brian, that’s very informative.
Sorry – typo (WHY CAN’T WE EDIT COMMENTS!!) – the Fair Dealing bit should have read:
Because of an agreement between the Society of Authors and the Publishers’ Association, extracts not exceeding certain limits may be quoted without permission, provided that acknowledgement to author and source is made either in the text or in a footnote.
I see this question about editing comments a lot, but you can’t edit comments on most blogging platforms (Blogger, Typepad, Wordpress etc) – it doesn’t seem to be a standard feature.
that’s because most blogging platforms don’t have highly intelligent and skillful editors watching our every move.
Well, this
highly intelligent and skillfulroughly average editor makes plenty of typos, etc, in comments, mainly through forgetting to press “preview” I admit – a live and let live culture needs to prevail ;-)Editing comments is fine until someone uses it to airbrush the past. It happened on one discussion board I read to the extent that they removed the edit button from the person who was doing it. So it can be a two-edged sword.
Agreed, Bob, and this is a temptation for a good few bloggers in their posts, also – use of strike-out to make post-post corrections is not always used.
Maxine – I thought strikeouts were for in-post
Henryismswiticisms – I hadn’t realized you should use them for corrections!I think strike-outs have acquired a special Nature Network use, Brian. But out there in the “blogosphere untamed” they are commonly used by a blogger who wants to correct a post (usually because a commenter points out an error or omisssion), to indicate (1) a correction has been made and (2) to retain the meaning of the comment, which would otherwise be rendered moot.
It is a widespread convention, though some people prefer asterisks/footnotes.
Regarding comments: make them editable for a limited time, or as long as it’s the last comment. I get a lot of comments on my blog that are corrections of typos, and it’s as annoying as unnecessary. At the very least, allow commenters to completely delete their own comments (as it is the case over at blogger), then at least one can rewrite.
Spot on, Sabine.