I've known about Gaudio's site for a while, and I can't believe the editor of this magazine thought it was an okay thing to do. I don't condone all of the harassment they've recieved, but I do think it's kind of cosmically hilarious that the internet provided the opportunity for them to violate her copyright, and then allowed her (and the Internet) to become aware of it.
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posted
So when bloggers copy wholesale from print media, information just wants to be free. When it's the other way around, print media are evil bastards. Is that the basic gist?
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Blayne Bradley
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posted
Are these bloggers making a dime when they do that? Is it trully wholesale or at least possibly justified under fair use?
In this case the Magazine has appeared to have a systemic pattern of taking articles and photos wholesale and only ever crediting the writers and not the source, genuinely thinking anything on the internet is "public domain", I'm skeptical in the claim that bloggers apparantly do it all the time and certain that this was a clear violation of copywrite and owes the damaged party monetary compensation.
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quote:Originally posted by Juxtapose: So when bloggers copy wholesale from print media, information just wants to be free. When it's the other way around, print media are evil bastards. Is that the basic gist?
posted
There does seem to be an imbalance here between what is considered acceptable in print and what is considered acceptable on blogs. Bloggers presumably could make a dime the same way the magazine was - through advertising.
Is the problem here that the magazine took the information (meaning the recipe itself)? Or is the problem here that the magazine took the whole writeup of the recipe?
Posts: 8120 | Registered: Jul 2000
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posted
It has nothing to do with making a dime. However, the magazine took whole works and represented them as its own, while bloggers (who are behaving well, and this describes most bloggers with much of a following) take excerpts and provide commentary upon them.
The latter is handily protected under fair use. The former is not. There's really no confusion.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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posted
It wasn't just a recipe, it was a 1300-word article that involved an amount of knowledge and research that was not insignificant.
Because it's the internet, you can find anything, including people who break laws relating to copyright on blogs. And yes, it is just as bad as offenders in print media.
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Bloggers may not post entire copyrighted works. If they do, they should be called on it. They are allowed to post excerpts if they use them as part of a commentary, which is protected under Fair Use. But even that may also be restricted if they are direct competitors of the source from which they acquired the copyrighted material, if they excerpt the integral part of the material, and if they make money off it. Then it's a judgment call by the court.
Just because vast amounts of the Internet swipes stuff doesn't make it legal, but generally only the really egregious cases get noticed. If the reposter gets called out and they apologize and pull it, no worries. If they get called out and defend their use, may or may not be a thing. If they get called out and say something boneheaded like the Internet is public domain, and continue to insist it despite overwhelming proof to the contrary, they deserve to have the Internet land on them.
Posts: 7790 | Registered: Aug 2000
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posted
Okay, it does look like I was wrong. It's what I deserve for skimming on my break at work. I also didn't mean to impugn each and every blogger. Sorry.
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quote:Bloggers may not post entire copyrighted works.
Not quite true; sometimes an entire work (usually when it is quite short) is acceptable to use under fair use (and has been found so by courts). A good guideline, though.
quote:But even that may also be restricted if they are direct competitors of the source from which they acquired the copyrighted material
This bit is irrelevant. And whether or not they make money off of it usually only has to do with whether or not there are damages (though I think this might change at some point), not whether or not it is infringement (note: certain uses, such as being educational are considered moderating for the purposes of determining if there's infringement).
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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posted
According to some summary pages that have been tracking this, some articles were posted verbatim under a different name (at least one of the people listed as writers for the magazine). I recall a WebMD article in particular, and IIRC, WebMD has been contacted and lays claim to it. So yeah, a lot of lifting without permission, but also alleged misattributions as well.
Posts: 831 | Registered: Jul 2005
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quote:Not quite true; sometimes an entire work (usually when it is quite short) is acceptable to use under fair use (and has been found so by courts). A good guideline, though.
I could see that for educational use, or if it's a haiku or something and was posted along with a review of it or as part of an article about the author. But it would have be part of that larger article and thus be considered a transformational work; just reposting it would still be infringement.
quote:This bit is irrelevant. And whether or not they make money off of it usually only has to do with whether or not there are damages (though I think this might change at some point), not whether or not it is infringement (note: certain uses, such as being educational are considered moderating for the purposes of determining if there's infringement).
(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes; (2) the nature of the copyrighted work; (3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and (4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
Italics mine. I work for a newspaper website. Someone swiping our articles and posting them on their personal blog that's based in Alaska is not going to affect our market much, and we'd probably send them a polite please-knock-it-off, here's-how-you-can-use-our-work-properly, thanks-for-reading-us sort of e-mail, even if they had ads on their site and were potentially profiting. If a local news site, one that's based in the same area we are and is trying for the same readers and same advertisers that we are, posted the exact same article then I submit that's a great deal more serious. Both are infringements, but the second one, due to the intent of the infringer and the possible market affect of the infringement, is the one we would go after legally as they were using our copyrighted work to benefit their company.
Same article, just as available to the world, both legally considered copyright infringements, but in the second case the additional factors of competition and loss of market value would weigh heavily in our favor.
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posted
I wasn't saying what would affect your decisions to pursue or not, I was saying what would affect the legal determination. While economic concerns are part of the consideration, the extent to which the use is by a competitor isn't really part of it. Lots of things can make a copyright holder be more forgiving that have nothing to do with the legality of the situation.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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posted
That said, it is amazing how many trained and experienced journalists and editors I've worked with who thought you could just take stuff from websites. Not articles, usually, but quite often I've had to explain that no, we can't just take pictures from Facebook pages or blogs without permission. We can use a snapshot of the entire visible webpage that contains that image, for news purposes, but that's it.
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