grodscorp@grods.comQuoting or thieving?
 | Posted by Scott on Thursday 19 June 2008, 2:24 pm Categories: Blogosphere, Media Tags: Tags: AP, quotes |
There’s a big story in the US at the moment about how wire news service AP is looking closely at copyright laws for a way to charge bloggers for quoting from their stories.
The AP recently sent seven takedown notices to [a] social news site for the offense of reposting a few sentences or more and reprinting their headlines, sometimes linking those sentences and headlines to the full stories generated from the New York-based media concern.
Dr “Tingtong” John Ray at A Western Heart has picked up on the story*, which is kinda ironic given his habit of reposting entire news articles as his own posts without adding any real content of his own. Last week he published a post which contained three full news articles from other sources with only this line of his own writing.
Three current articles below
But let’s put aside the law for a moment and think about this in ethical and moral terms. News organisations put content on their websites for free in exchange for assaulting your eyeballs with ads to recoup the cost and turn a profit. When a blogger cut-and-pastes giant swathes of the article into their own site, even if there is a link back to the original article, the likelihood of a reader consuming the news organisation’s advertisements is severely reduced. Even if the blogger only quotes a few lines or a paragraph with a source link the chance of the blog reader consuming the original ads is still reduced. Is it therefore wrong (not legally though, remember) for bloggers to quote news articles? And if so, is there a limit to how much the blogger should quote?
Discuss.
* Don’t you just love the final line of Tingtong’s post? “I intend just to ignore the whole thing. Three of my blogs get around 1,000 hits per day but I am still way below the radar, I think. Not a bad place to be in this crazy age.” Tosser.
