Tuesday, February 10, 2009

Hypocrisy on Copywrite?

We had a blog about the JT sending takedown notices to our friends at the Racine News. A current blog on health care on the JT features an article copied and pasted from Bloomburg.com. Just for reference sake, you can read Bloomburg's Terms of Service which defintiely frown on this type of cut and pasting of Bloomburg's stories. This was specifically addressed in the JT rules for blogging and commenting.

Heck, since this violates the JTs Terms of Service, you can even charge him with "hacking" the web site as you might recall I blogged about this before (and feel this is a real abuse of the charge of hacking!)

Care to take a pool on what the JT does when the roles are reversed?

12 comments:

OrbsCorbs said...

I don't know how much they moderate the personal blogs. Wasn't it Huck who said he posted a blog there with obscenities in the middle of it and no one said anything?

If the roles were reversed, I think it would depend upon who was cutting and pasting the Journal Times.

MinnesotaChick said...

They used to moderate the personal blogs too!
That one Huck posted about should never have been left up. TOS?? Many violations in that one. What happened to their censored words? Too many F-bombs flying in that one.

As for this subject. I'm sure they will pull it and bury it once called on it.

AvengingAngel said...

Sorry, that was me that posted the obsenity filled blog. It's just the typical hypocrites at the RJT.

drewzepmeister said...

I thought you guys meant Huck's comment on KC's Irrevelent Blog about a Austrian town. That got deleted after being online for three days.

I've noticed lately the the lack of moderation on the JT personal blogs. The one I was telling you guys about stayed on for the longest time. It seems they moderate the newsblogs and not the personal ones so much.

Back to the subject,the JT is a desperate newspaper,I wouldn't be surprised if they went after "hackers."

drewzepmeister said...

Oh wow, I just reread the Bucket List blog. The nasties got ### over "certain" words.

SER said...

I wonder how many copyright laws I have to violate before the federal government will bail me out!

Them silly bastards!!!

OrbsCorbs said...

SER, if you figure out a way to finagle a bailout from the feds, don't forget your buddies here at the JTI. As a community-oriented news blog, I think we are as deserving of government financial support as any irrelevant, Jurassic Park newspaper.

hale-bopp said...

Orbs, the point is that the Journal Times did recently go after someone for allegedly lifting their articles but don't police their own blogs. It's not like there are that many personal blogs over there right now or that this is difficult to see as the person left the Bloomburg author info on the article.

I have a thing for IP...I generate a bit of it in my job and we do enforce the rights when appropriate.

OrbsCorbs said...

I wasn't defending them, hale, just saying that they've always been sloppy about "the rules." They enforce them when it suits their purpose, and don't when it doesn't. That's why this place exists. And Racine Post. And Racine News. And all the other blogs started by people who got disgusted with the Journal Times' hypocrisy and disdain for their customers. "Racine's" newspaper is run by a small group of myopic outlanders. Instead of playing to their audience, they keep trying to change the audience, and they've managed to chase off just about everyone who disagrees with them. They're complete and utter horses' asses - I know that.

OrbsCorbs said...

Oh, and creativity and smarts scare the pants off of them. It goes back to your previous blog, hale, about barriers to innovation. They swat down anything they don't understand. Unfortunately, that's quite a lot.

OrbsCorbs said...

Hale, the Journal Times agrees with you in theory, if not in practice: http://www.journaltimes.com/articles/2009/02/11/opinion/doc49921ca4dced9801239554.txt.

hale-bopp said...

Strangely enough, orbs, I think the JT's editorial is taking a pretty draconian view of copyright (and I am gong to start spelling it correctly) that I do not agree with. The AP picture formed the basis of the poster, yet the color scheme and design made the end product substantially different than the original which is exactly what fair use is designed to protect. I found the article (ironically) on Bloomburg about this case.

Think for a minute: How many copies of the poster do you think the AP would have sold if they just printed their original photo? Few to none I am betting. Love or hate Obama, that is a cool poster he made that is substantially different than the original.

Now one thing that I will admit still gets me is the exact process of creating the poster. Did he use the photo directly and tools such as photoshop or did he use the photo as a reference and paint it himself? I always see in the stories he claims it was a "reference" which implies the latter, but I would feel more confident if the artistic process was spelled out a little better.

For reference, you can see the original photo next to the poster for yourself.

One of the blogs I keep meaning to sit down and write someday deals with orphan copyrights, works which are still covered but no one knows who owns it...but that is another topic!