Times steals Edgar Wright blog post, the copyright fairy explodes in a fireball
Because information and media is very accessible online, there’s a generation growing up that expects everything to be free. Because they’ve only known torrents and online sharing, they think nothing of taking what they don’t have the right to take, be it music, movies or content.
I’ve had this kind of thing happen to me on occasion. Things I’ve written have been reprinted without credit or permission, often in eBay listings, but sometimes in blogs. Bits of websites have also been grabbed, but usually for personal projects, by people who probably don’t grasp the way copyright works, and I’ve never seen a need to smack anyone with a legal hammer of doom.
What’s staggering, though, is how a general disregard and ignorance for copyright is spreading throughout the commercial arena. We had the BBC nicking a Robert Llewellyn YouTube clip, and Lily Allen stealing all sorts of content to, ironically, bitch about rights infringement in the music industry (and the subsequent revisionism that followed), but an hour or so ago something truly bizarre was reported.
Edgar Wright, he of Spaced, Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz fame, said on Twitter: Answer me how this http://tinyurl.com/yfr6ad4 is cut down to this http://tinyurl.com/y9w3s3x without my permission, blessing or approval.
The Times had, without permission, taken Wright’s heartfelt tribute to Edward Woodward, hacked it down and, in Wright’s words, “gut[ted] it of all feeling”. Amazingly, Media Monkey reports that the rip even made the print edition, with a photo of a grinning Wright placed cheekily alongside.
Although I utterly disagree with chilling government proposals regarding copyright infringement law, it is shocking how few people realise that just because something is online, that doesn’t mean it’s freely available to use and abuse as you see fit. That a supposedly professional organisation like The Times, stuffed full of journos who could write their own piece (or at least have the decency to ask Wright for permission), so blatantly stole work from anyone, let alone a famous film director, is almost beyond belief.
Update: The Times online has now updated the article, using all of Wright’s original copy and crediting his blog as the original source.
Update 2: Wright reports that, on his request, The Times will make a donation to a charity of Edward Woodward’s family’s choosing.
I note you’ve posted his tweet, presumably without permission.
While I agree that it’s not the same thing, it’s still the same *kind* of thing.
Do you need to ask permission to quote from a tweet? Do you need to ask permission to display this comment (which is written by me, but no-where does it suggest that by pressing the ‘post comment’ button I give you the right to publish it*)?
My point is, if it’s okay to reproduce twitter posts and edited quotes (as you have done), but not okay to edit a blog post (badly, but that’s beside the point), then where should the line be drawn?
*Yes, I realise I’d have to be an exceptionally dumb commenter not to be aware of this.
I am reporting on an incident and quoting Wright in context. That’s a world away from what the Times did. The equivalent would be me lifting one of Wright’s posts, editing it heavily, and then placing it on Revert to Saved in such a way that makes it look like _he_ wrote the piece himself for my blog.
I agree that there’s a grey area when it comes to stuff like this, but the actions of The Times are way outside of that.
The above sentance should have read:
“but not okay to edit a blog post (badly, but that’s beside the point) and publish it on a news site, then where should the line be drawn? “
And now I can’t spell ‘sentence’.
Clearly not my day.
It is worrying how quickly quoting from Twitter, e-mails and blogs has become part of the mainstream news… you see journalists on TV quoting peoples’ reactions to major news stories, and online articles padded out with snippets from other online sources. There seems to be less rigour and fact-checking in journalism just because you can go online and quickly find an opinion on anything.
Absolutely, and a lot of people still don’t get the human (and rather unedited, bar brevity) nature of Twitter.
The Wright incident is worse, though, because someone at _The Times_ lifted an entire blog post, edited it and printed it, without permission. I’m still amazed that such a publication would do this. The ‘apology’ was also disgraceful, The Times merely pointing out the reprint was abridged and linking (in broken fashion initially) to the original source.
I do believe that one media mogul recently railed against the likes of Google stealing his corporations work for free.
That would be R Murdoch, proprietor of The Times.
But that is a different argument, about paying for online content, rather than the wholesale “borrowing” of Tweets and e-mails…
Not entirely. Murdoch was angry that Google cached (and therefore ‘reprinted’) his organisation’s IP without permission (although a single robots.txt file would have stopped this), and yet one of his papers has stolen and reprinted someone’s content without permission.