Comments on: Plagiarism in the Midst of Chaos

By: Jonathan Bailey

Jonathan Bailey — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 17:30:00 +0000

This is true, but it is important to remember that, t hanks to VARA in the U.S. and moral rights elsewhere, attribution is still always supposed to come with it. Moral rights are supposed to be inalienable, meaning that they can’t be given up. Still, a valid point about the rights one does often surrender…

By: Rad Winters

Rad Winters — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 14:23:00 +0000

Another thing to keep in mind is that when you submit a photo or any other content to a website, oftentimes there is Fine Print informing you that when you submit content, you give up any rights to it.

By: Jonathan Bailey

Jonathan Bailey — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 12:30:53 +0000

This is true, but it is important to remember that, t hanks to VARA in the U.S. and moral rights elsewhere, attribution is still always supposed to come with it. Moral rights are supposed to be inalienable, meaning that they can't be given up. Still, a valid point about the rights one does often surrender…

By: Rad Winters

Rad Winters — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 09:23:56 +0000

By: Jonathan Bailey

Jonathan Bailey — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 09:17:00 +0000

I guess that’s the other moral of the story. Keep your lenses clean people. Even if it is your cell phone camera. You never know when you might see something the world needs to know about!

By: Jonathan Bailey

Jonathan Bailey — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 09:16:00 +0000

If MSNBC hadn’t made such a good effort on TV to attribute the image correctly, I would probably not be as forgiving as I am right now. I think it shows that they tried to do right but something broke down between the TV people and the Web people. This happens sadly. I agree that it is fairly easy to determine attribution in most cases, but when you’re rushing to get stuff out there as fast as the information comes in, it’s the easy stuff that gets dropped.

I agree with your thoughts on how users should deal with content they are posting on the Web, but one has to remember that, in this case, the people posting the content were not the ones that were deciding what goes up and where. MSNBC creates an incredible amount of content every day and it is easy to see why, if attribution were omitted, how the Web team could have operated under a false assumption. Sloppy work? Yes. But a pardonable offense I think.

I do like the idea of an attribution unknown link, however, I feel certain on a site like MSNBC, you’d get every wingnut and lunatic claiming credit for the work. If the system can be created to filter out such problems, then it could work…

By: James Cox

James Cox — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 04:54:00 +0000

I agree in general, except – the provenance of this image was stuck to two or three locations (at least, initially, as the news broke). Twitpic (The original location which crashed soon after posting) and the flickr mirror.

The point is, i don’t think it was hard to spot the attribution.

I appreciate that breaking news is often chaotic, but that’s irrelevant when the information is easy enough to find. I think that this is just laissez faire behavior – oh, it’s citizen media, so who cares? More so when stories have content for minutes, hours – when news changes so quickly – the ability to steal content is so easy.

(interesting sidepoint: users who steal copyrighted media are often both sides of the fence!)

When posting content online, the first question should be: “who owns this? can I post it? have i asked permission?”

and when you can’t find it, you should state something like “attribution unknown, click here to report” and have it fixed as soon as it’s made clear. This is just good policy- what MSNBC appeared to do was disgraceful.

By: Jonathan Bailey

Jonathan Bailey — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 04:17:22 +0000

I guess that's the other moral of the story. Keep your lenses clean people. Even if it is your cell phone camera. You never know when you might see something the world needs to know about!

By: Jonathan Bailey

Jonathan Bailey — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 04:16:35 +0000

If MSNBC hadn't made such a good effort on TV to attribute the image correctly, I would probably not be as forgiving as I am right now. I think it shows that they tried to do right but something broke down between the TV people and the Web people. This happens sadly. I agree that it is fairly easy to determine attribution in most cases, but when you're rushing to get stuff out there as fast as the information comes in, it's the easy stuff that gets dropped.

I do like the idea of an attribution unknown link, however, I feel certain on a site like MSNBC, you'd get every wingnut and lunatic claiming credit for the work. If the system can be created to filter out such problems, then it could work…

By: James Cox

James Cox — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 23:54:36 +0000

The point is, i don't think it was hard to spot the attribution.

I appreciate that breaking news is often chaotic, but that's irrelevant when the information is easy enough to find. I think that this is just laissez faire behavior – oh, it's citizen media, so who cares? More so when stories have content for minutes, hours – when news changes so quickly – the ability to steal content is so easy.

(interesting sidepoint: users who steal copyrighted media are often both sides of the fence!)

When posting content online, the first question should be: "who owns this? can I post it? have i asked permission?"

and when you can't find it, you should state something like "attribution unknown, click here to report" and have it fixed as soon as it's made clear. This is just good policy- what MSNBC appeared to do was disgraceful.