Comments on: Times steals Edgar Wright blog post, the copyright fairy explodes in a fireball

By: Craig Grannell

Craig Grannell — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 15:53:34 +0000

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.

By: Merman

Merman — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 15:38:09 +0000

But that is a different argument, about paying for online content, rather than the wholesale “borrowing” of Tweets and e-mails…

By: Mike Landers

Mike Landers — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 11:52:04 +0000

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.

By: Craig Grannell

Craig Grannell — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 10:48:51 +0000

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.

By: Merman

Merman — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 10:36:30 +0000

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.