bloggers beware! the alexandria daily town talk is trolling around our blogs looking for their content and threatening to call in the lawyers. fellow blogger cenlamar received a nasty gram from them earlier today.
see: The Town Talk to CenLamar: You Need Prior Written Approval. Otherwise, We're Calling Our Lawyers.
see: The Town Talk to CenLamar: You Need Prior Written Approval. Otherwise, We're Calling Our Lawyers.
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I didn't interpret the letter as particularly nasty, just a man doing his job to protect his company's copyrighted photography. That's fair, and they gave Lamar the person to contact to get permission next time. I feel sure Lamar can get another pic of Jacques Roy to post. Perhaps references to their attorney was unnecessary. I only saw the posted letter after Lamar removed said photo.
ReplyDeleteIt's good to know our local press is reading the blogs to get the behind the scenes pulse of the community. They note that some of us are looking to blogs to get the "back stories" of area politics.
good point and thanks for your comment.
ReplyDeleteMargaret,
ReplyDeleteThe main problem I had with the letter was the part about needing prior written approval in order to use any content from the TT. We should be able to reference quotes and excerpts from articles as a way of making commentary.
- Lamar
I agree, but I am no authority on the laws governing this. Does the cited requirement to obtain permission extend to blog responders, like myself, or just the bloggers-in-chief?
ReplyDeletesee thats a good question. what if you copy and paste a town talk article into the comments field of a blog? did you just make yourself in violation of the copyright laws? or is the blog owner in violation and how do you determine who the blog owner is? or even who the commentor is? slippery slopes and chilling effects are not good.
ReplyDeleteps. all this is is a lawyers get rich quick scheme. and a waste of time for a company to actually pay someone to sit around and look for what they perceive to be violations. once something is released onto the internet its gone. you cant control it.
ReplyDeleteYeah, the laws relating to copyright infringement and the Internet are nebulous and difficult to define.
ReplyDeleteBut I'm just doing this for fun. No profit involved. No money changes hands. And anyone is welcome to join the discussion.
And I agree with you WeSawThat. The TT failed to understand a cease and desist letters is a blogger's DREAM.
ReplyDeleteAs the guy who sent the note, I'd like to make a couple of comments.
ReplyDeleteFirst, you're right that we should probably refrain from mentioning attorneys in the first note we send in matters like this. I'll learn from this and try to do better next time.
Second, it is not our goal to try to censor the internet. However, we would like for the people who view materials we create to do so with the knowledge that they came from us and view them on our site.
Why is that a big deal to us? Because when someone copies materials and pastes them somewhere else, they could be altered or taken out of context. Words and quotes could be altered or omitted, changing the tone or meaning of the story. Pictures and graphics can be digitally altered. If an altered story or photograph is attributed as what ran in The Town Talk, the reader could think we published things that we didn't. It's our reputation on the line, and we do take that seriously. We understand there are folks who dislike or disagree with what we publish, we would just like for them to form their opinions based on what we actually publish, not what someone else says we published.
Before I get blasted for that, let me make it clear that ISN'T what happened here. There was no deception or anything like that. Lamar simply pasted a picture from our site on his site rather than posting a link to it. We asked that he correct that, and he did quickly and professionally, which we appreciate very much.
Finally, regarding Lamar's concern about using a brief excerpt or a quote, under the fair use rules (to which he posted a link), that sort of thing is fine. It's when someone takes more than just an excerpt, like the whole story or the main parts of one, or a photograph or graphics, and reposts them on another site that we object.
hi mr smilie thanks for your comment, actually what lamar did was to hotlink to that particular photograph. what we would have done would have been first to change the url of the photograph so that the link would be broken - on lamar's site and then would have emailed him asking him not to hotlink to your pictures since it uses the town talks bandwidth etc. then we would have told him that all he needed to do was to email so and so for permission to use the picture and he could have then saved it and uploaded it onto his own account.
ReplyDeleteas far as the text we suppose its true that someone could edit your articles to make them read anyway they wanted to although they would be found out rather quickly and wouldnt be taken seriously.
by the same token someone could change around your stories and paste them to an email and instantly transmit them out all around the world.
and we think that you have the right to remove your stories and put them in an archive and charge people to access it although that doesnt work that well as we have seen on cenla antics when someone with a town talk archive access copied and pasted stories there.
theres really nothing you can do unless someone is stealing your content and claiming it as their own. on the bright side anytime any blog etc mentions the town talk thats free advertising and that has to be worth something.
I can sympathize with the Town Talk. I make money from ad revenues. You get paid for the amount of times each ad is seen (impressions). Ads are displayed on the same page as the article.
ReplyDeleteIf you copy and paste a Town Talk article, you are essentially stealing ad revenue dude.
I link to the Town talk All the Time and have never heard any complaints. That's because I'm increasing their traffic by linking to them. This is a WIN/WIN situation.
TRAFFIC is the lifeblood of any website and when you cut and paste an entire article you are cutting into the Town Talk's traffic and costing them money.
The Town Talk isn't censoring, but one can argue that you're stealing.
Just FYI.
ya chad we dont totally disagree with you and we send to you town talk (and other)links to consider linking to all the time.
ReplyDeleteour "thing" is that (and we see it all the time) is people googling for information about this or that and they arrive at our blog. we always put the link and credit back to the article or the main page but sometimes pages have a way of being removed from the web.
so, sometimes we put the entire article for people that are researching etc - its mostly for their convenience; personally we always prefer to read the article directly from the originating website and judging from our "outclicks" log we send traffic that these websites wouldnt get in the first place if we didnt have something about it to start with. lol.
for example the richard lee mcnair story we have sent lots of traffic to the town talk, america's most wanted, those canadian websites and the northside journal - traffic that they wouldnt have received if not for us blogging about richard lee mcnair to start with. even your site the dead pelican has received traffic from us that you wouldnt have otherwise.
anyway, we dont do this for money or even for hits, its a way to get important information out and its a hobby.
Chad,
ReplyDeleteI understand and appreciate the plight of Gannett. It's not like they control 90% of the major newspaper markets in the state of Louisiana, and it's not like they're attempting to control distribution points for independent publications throughout the South. That's precisely why it makes sense to threaten legal action against a blogger who probably directs 500-600 visitors per day to one of their many websites. Even though this blogger does not profit at all from this enterprise, he is STEALING ad revenue from them.
Honestly, I respect your blog, your agenda, and your opinions. But it has never been my intention to steal anything from the Town Talk. Today, in fact, I wrote yet another check for advertising in the Town Talk.
My intention has always been to shed additional light on the local news, to showcase the events that shape our community, and to express my opinions on the future of Central Louisiana. This, I believe, can only benefit a publication, like the Town Talk, that speaks to the daily life of our community.
The problem with these large companies is that they lose sight of what's actually important. I am not blogging for profit. If I had decided to print, publish, and sell unattributed photos from the Town Talk, I could understand the need for taking necessary legal action.
But, I do not rely on ad revenue. If anything, I direct people to the Town Talk's ads; the reverse, I am certain, could never be proven.
Kinda thunk you'd see it dat way.
ReplyDeleteAh well.
Now one way around all this grief is to summarize the part of the article that you want to highlight. For example, you can directly copy and paste, and add a tag at the end of it that says THE TOWN TALK reports.
For example, "Bloggers are calling Rodney Alexander a total dope, THE TOWN TALK reports today. THE TOWN TALK reports that bloggers Cenlamar and We Saw That blah blah blah blah... " You get the picture.
That's an example of SUMMARIZING. Nobody can accurately call that PLAGIARIZING.
Just FYI.
Right. And again, it's never been my intention to steal or to plagiarize. If anything, my hope is to contribute to the discussion, not to take away from it.
ReplyDeleteOne other thing. I find newspapers don't mind so much when you link to pictures. That way, the pictures is displayed on your site but isn't actuallly posted.
ReplyDelete