Since the 1990s, I’ve written for a lot of internet magazines. Something that constantly crops up is the thorny issue of copyright. Many people make the assumption that if something’s online, they somehow have the right to take it for themselves. Perhaps this is down to the ubiquity of dodgy file-sharing, or the fact that a lot of content online is freely available. Either way, lots of rights are infringed online on a daily basis, and I’ve written many articles that state very clearly how one should always check regarding rights before reusing anything.

If an individual makes a mistake in this area, they can be forgiven (assuming they don’t do so again). Astonishingly, though, it seems the editorial director for digital at one of the UK’s national newspapers doesn’t understand basic rights assignment. This thread from PeteZab’s Flickr account details how The Independent embedded snowy scenes from the UK using the Flickr API, but, presumably, screwed up the rights filter, thereby including images marked ‘all rights reserved’.

What’s shocking here is not that such a mistake was made—oversights happen all the time—but that the editors’s response was as follows:

“We took a stream from Flickr which is, as you know, a photo-sharing website. The legal assumption, therefore, is that you were not asserting your copyright in that arena. We did not take the photo from Flickr, nor present it as anything other than as it is shown there.

I do no consider, therefore, that any copyright has been breached or any payment due. ”

Presumably, then, The Independent will be fine if I start using content from its website (as long as I don’t present it than anything other than how it’s shown on its site), regardless of any assigned rights! Great! Although if The Independent really doesn’t think it did anything wrong, why did it pull the Flickr feed?

Update: The Independent ‘apologises’, and the publication has been invoiced by the photographer.