Posts Tagged “copyright”

As you may have noticed, October was a pretty poor month posting-wise here at limeduck world headquarters.  I was therefore quite excited to see a new inbound link in my dashboard.  I followed it and found another example of an all-too-common blogging phenomenon: grabbing peoples’ photos to illustrate your posts without permission or attribution.

Since the post was about being laid off from working at a bakery (and as of this writing, the author is still unemployed), I felt sort of bad dropping a stink bomb in the comments. I can’t stay mad at the unemployed knitting blogger, but I can complain that this practice is widespread in personal and even corporate blogs, and it really must stop.  I often cite Fair Use, but this is not it.  Fair Use is, among other things, publishing a portion of  a copyrighted work to illuminate a discussion or review of that work.  The attribution is clear because you’re discussing that work.

Blogging about how frustrated you are by  your cell phone carrier (a common enough blog topic) does not mean you can just search the net for “frustration” or “cell phone plan” and clip one of the image results for your post.  You’ve got to make an attempt to find out the copyright status of the image and do the right thing.

I’m sure you can find times when I’ve done it wrong (do let me know, I’d like to fix them), but here’s what I try to do these days:

• Try to use my own work as much as possible
• Sample others’ works when discussing them, but keep it clear what’s quoted and keep images and media small/short or embedded
• Use product images when discussing those products
• Always link the image to the source (source web page, not source image) and attribute with at least <alt> text, preferably caption or nearby copy

Copyright and Fair Use are not quite fully adapted to the internets yet, but I’m trying to hold up my end.  I hope other bloggers will think a little more about their image-acquisition habits.

It recently came to my attention that I have become a spokesperson for Lake Champlain Chocolates. Specifically, they have taken a liberal quote from this very blog and featured it on their chocolaty web site. [Looks like Lake C have updated their site with a different quote. For the moment, you can see the cached version of my semi-quote here, further proof that nothing is ever truly erased on the internet.] Read the original post here.  I suppose I should be flattered, but instead I’m annoyed. Why?

1. They didn’t ask, or even tell. How hard would it be to send an email,”Hey, we love what you wrote, can we use it on our site?” or even an after the fact notification that they had done so. This stuff is copyrighted, you know.

2. They didn’t link. Seems to me that internetwise, the proper form of attribution is a live link, so readers can click through and view the full context of the quote. On the plus side, they did attribute the quote to “David K., Limeduck.com”

3. They edited the quote. This is the worst sin in my opinion. They clipped out a few words without using ellipsis. The changes didn’t alter things in any substantial way, (we all know my writing could use a nip and tuck now and again) but it’s still lousy journalism.

I don’t run the sort of blog where I talk up products and expect glory, samples or schwag for my efforts, but a quick note from a vendor, or even an appearance in the comments section, would go a long way toward my continued goodwill, and probably that of both of my regular readers.

So, my cocoa-dusted friends from Vermont, if you’re still scraping the interwebs for juicy words of praise for your products, I call foul on your policy of not so fair use and urge you to mend your ways. It’s not so hard. You can do it. And when you’re done, get back to the chocolate mines!