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.

It’s getting to the point that not a day goes by without some idiot or other trying to undermine the BBC. Usually, it’s the government or the Tories, who in no way use smacking the BBC as a way of engaging with Daily Mail-reading voters. Rupert Murdoch’s another major critic, which is in no way due to him having a massive stake in one of the BBC’s biggest commercial competitors, Sky.

Yesterday, Policy Exchange got in on the act (Policy Exchange think tank calls for BBC overhaul), with the usual slew of garbage opinions. It slags off Jonathan Ross’s ‘salary’ (ignoring the fact this cash paid for the production of his shows, including dozens of Film 200Xs, hundreds of episodes of his chat-show, and his radio show), says the BBC should cut the money it spends on sport (despite the public outcry when the public broadcaster announces it’s been outbid for a popular event by a locked, subscription-only service) and popular entertainment (despite the BBC one minute being told to justify the licence fee by getting higher ratings, and the next being told it’s being too populist, and should therefore be creating niche stuff).

The report also has a go at the BBC’s audacity in reaching out to 16-to-35-year-olds, noting that cash for such programming should be aimed at US import channels Channel 4 and E4. Never mind that BBC Three’s output includes the likes of Being Human. Never mind the fact people under 35 pay the licence fee and therefore should expect at least some programming aimed at them. Never mind the fact the BBC isn’t beholden to advertisers and can therefore take more risks. Nope—shut it down, says Policy Exchange! Shut it all down!

Sadly, this kind of report seems to be the norm these days. I suspect regardless of whatever government the UK ends up with this year, it’ll start dismantling the BBC. And because too many British people are strangely oblivious to the value of the BBC (not only in terms of what you receive on TV, the radio and the web, but also as a public service), considering it a huge rip-off, it’ll end up a shell of its former self. Sooner or later, British television will largely be a thing of the past, with everyone fed on a steady diet of third-rate US television with ad-breaks every sixteen seconds. But, hey, it’ll be free, right? (Aside from the huge subscription fees that people will happily pay because they choose to, obviously.) Of course, the UK will only realise this when it’s too late, and when Murdock is laughing maniacally while sitting atop his solid-gold throne, in the shape of a Sky logo squashing the BBC into a bloody pulp.

The BBC reports that a cartoon pig will now have to wear a seat-belt in future episodes, due to a stupid person. It doesn’t expicitly say this, but that’s the gist of the article. The sequence of events seems to be:

1. Cartoon pig in fictional cartoon world doesn’t wear fictional cartoon seat-belt.
2. Child ‘refuses’ to wear seat-belt because Peppa Pig doesn’t wear one.
3. Stupid person (a.k.a. a parent) complains, rather than, you know, explaining to their kid that Peppa Pig is a cartoon and that everyone has to wear a seat-belt in the real world.
4. Production company caves, and says they’ll also (at presumably great cost) reanimate all old episodes “to reflect the change”.

Let’s hope the stupid parent’s kid never watches Tom and Jerry, or the parent will presumably petition Time Warner, rather than telling their little tyke that repeatedly attempting to kill the cat is wrong, regardless of whether it happened in a fictional cartoon world.

Designer Tom Muller earlier today linked on Twitter to a hateful Times article where Emily Gosden rips into the costs of graphic design and branding. This time, it’s the ‘NHS 60’ logo that’s under fire—the argument is that adding a couple of digits to the existing logo shouldn’t have cost £12,000. Yet again, an article in the mainstream press undermines the entire graphic design industry, without actually bothering to consider or research why the costs were as they were. God forbid that there’s anything more to design than ‘just doing it’. And, of course, Emily Gosden is presumably being paid about £3 per article for the Times, because as everyone knows, there’s no consideration or research behind writing—you ‘just do it’, right, Emily?

Tory MP Greg Hands also can’t resist having a pop at the designer scum who clearly ripped off tax payers (unlike London-based Hands himself, whose £300,000 of expenses—including £5,524 for ‘London Supplement’—were clearly all absolutely essential); he says: “Surely adding two digits doesn’t need to be outsourced at all. Civil servants can do this themselves. Modern graphic design packages surely allow anyone with an average brain to design something as good as, or better than, what we see in front of us here.”

Oh, really? Well, this blog likes to go the extra mile itself (and for the staggering fee of nothing at all), and so here’s what would have happened had Hands got his way:

The final brand: smart, stylish, and it probably went through 11 billion revisions to get to this stage, hence the £12,000 fee.

What would have happened if you’d armed a civil servant with Photoshop and told them to create the logo. And you wouldn’t have gotten any actual branding advice and alternative versions of the logo for print/web, and so on.

On Twitter and elsewhere, there’s a bit of a debate brewing right now about whether PRs should be ‘first against the wall’ when the revolution comes, or whether journos are a bunch of grumpy sods for moaning about being deluged by stuff they’ll likely be interested in writing about.

In the technology field, I find it strange journos are getting angry due to receiving press releases. Sure, many are irrelevant, and far too many are written in an absurdly needy manner, but even though I get dozens of these weekly (sometimes daily), I’d rather have more than fewer press releases. They enable me to find out about new stuff for zero effort, and if I’m not interested, a quick ‘delete’ banishes the release forever. (Note to journos claiming they’re annoyed by constant interruptions from PR emails: don’t check your email every time a new one arrives; alternatively, set up notification so you can glance at incoming email and only tend to urgent messages.)

That all said, there are three increasingly common things that irk me regarding PR guys, and so here are some helpful hints:

1. Only phone me for first contact or if something’s urgent. Do not phone me about a 0.0.1 app upgrade that you’ve decided is “revolutionary”. Phone calls are a major distraction—unless your call includes extremely exciting and interesting information, I will hate you.
2. When you’re pimping something you’re doing on the other side of the planet (say, the west coast of the USA or Australia), and I kindly inform you that I’m UK-based, don’t then try to convince me that I should show up via several more emails and phone calls. Yes, I’m sure I’d like to be at CES right now, but unless you buy me a ticket, I’m not going to visit just to see your new gizmo.
3. If you want me to check something out for review, send it to me. Don’t try to convince me to buy it myself because it’s the “Best Thing Ever”. I get very regular requests of this sort, and so even with 59p iPod games I’d be broke by the end of the month if I bought them all.