This is A) wrong, B) immaterial when it comes to the simple courtesy of attribution, which has been in place since the Pleistocene, C) retarded.
Retrocrush - which IS cool, though calling itself the "world's finest pop culture website" might be a bit hyperbolic - is at the center of the story. Site editor Robert Berry writes:
- On 11/20/03, I published an article on my website retroCRUSH.com called "The Worst Sex Scenes Ever: A Look At The Most Unsexy Sex Scenes". This pretty self-explanatory feature included my own write ups on 10 scenes from film history with commentary throughout.
On 12/30/03, The UK tabloid "The Daily Star" printed the same feature, with the same movies I used (even failing to omit a joke entry for the film Deliverance that I also included in my feature). Instead of crediting my site, however, they credited a seemingly fictitious American magazine named FILM. Not only did they highlight the films I mentioned, but they lifted three separate quotes from my article and attributed them to FILM magazine readers who responded to a (apparently non-existent) poll.
....To me, it seems obvious that a writer at The Daily Star saw my story, created a phony poll and feature from a non-existent magazine called FILM to use as a reference source, and used my quotes as reader comments in their feature. But it gets worse...
The World Entertainment News Newtwork (WENN), picked up this story and put it on their newswire service and now numerous newspapers (both online and print) have run the story on their own. In all of the examples I've found, this non existent FILM magazine is cited as the source material instead of me or my site. I spoke with the news desk of WENN, and they told me the source of their story was 12/30/03 edition of "The Daily Star".
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Article comments
1 - Madison
that is really sucks. I mean really sucks. I'll try to get the word out myself too.
2 - Hal Pawluk
If it's okay to steal music, what's wrong with stealling a story?
3 - Eric Olsen
This isn't "using" a story without paying for it - this is taking someone else's work and calling it your own. I'd say it was quite diffeent from file sharing, if that is the implied reference.
4 - jadester
this seems to be commonplace these days. Private Eye are good for pointing out such wilful acts of arseholeishness in our "Great" British press, and believe me even the more "reputable" broadsheets do not seem above this kind of thing. Unless you have the resources for a legal fight with the Star (please, oh PLEASE get them shut down! i think that could maybe actually make the other papers realise it's not on to do this) there isn't a whole lot you can do. Heh, take a load of their articles and publish them online as having come from some fictional British newspaper (i'm quite happy to help come up with realistic names =+) and then pimp those pages. Then again, if they weren't original work in the first place, that'd just confuse things even more.
I *am* surprised that other media sources took the Star's word for the source of the story though. It's not exactly a reputable paper to say the least.
5 - John Mudd
Newspapers and even broadcast news outlets write stories all the time featuring someone else's work, using other stories as sources, but they do attribute the original source of the information somewhere in the article. Perhaps that's the difference between responsible journalism and tabloid trash, which is what The Daily Star does appear to be.
6 - Eric Olsen
attribution is the key here - thanks for the help Madison!
7 - TDavid
This happens a lot with pictures, sound and images too on websites, though usually not in the news, but on blogs and personal websites. People seem to wrongly think that they can just "borrow" these things for their websites without permission.
It is one thing to take a screenshot and attribute it to a website, but to hotlink original content (stealing bandwith) or to use the "save picture as" to rip images and pictures to republish on their website shows some serious stones and is total thievery.
Google images has already been tested in the courts with their use of images and that's one of the biggest stretches a website can take using another website's images without permission.
8 - Eric Olsen
Also a problem, but still different in that "using" the pic doesn't prevent anyone else from seeing it or using it - it's the infinite digital reporduction thing - but taking the original work or someone and calling it your own DOES rob them of something even more precious than payment: authorship.
9 - Mac Diva
Ah, so. Sometimes it seems as if reporters and writers are the only people in the blogosphere who care about, or even understand, attribution and copyright.
However, I am not clear on something: Did Berry prominently display a copyright notice on his article so there was no ambiguity?
10 - Eric Olsen
He has a copyright notice at the bottom of every page including the worst sex scenes story, but what is confusing me is that the open letter I link to here is gone already. I wonder if there has been some kind of legal threat from The Daily Star or one of the syndicators. Are you out there Robert?
11 - Mac Diva
I don't believe they would have grounds to force him to remove a commentary they don't like, Eric. Maybe it is just a broken link.
Unsolicited legal advice: Add a permissions link to copyrighted material, so people have an avenue for getting the right to use the material. That enhances one's position if they still lift it.