For bloggers it can be a long and difficult road to reach success and occasionally come close to your subjects and conduct an interview with them. It was great to see that UK Manchester United blog Red Rants had the opportunity to run an exclusive interview with world star Nemanja Vidic. This would be the ultimate dream for many a sports blogger but things aren’t always as nice as they seem. Content theft often is an issue, especially when exclusive entries, interviews are scored.
Red Rants was no exception to this rule. Only some later, today, two main stream UK media outlets used the interview without attribution. Both published quotes of the interview without referring to the source. The Skysports article consist of more than 50% quotes. Surprisingly Skysports Terms and Conditions do NOT allow reproduction and even don’t mention Fair Use.
2.3 You will not copy, download, reproduce, republish, frame, broadcast, transmit in any manner whatsoever, any material on the Sky Site except as is strictly necessary for Your own personal non-commercial home use.
4.1 All copyright, trade marks and all other intellectual property rights in all material or content supplied as part of the Sky Site shall remain at all times vested in Us or Our licensors. You are permitted to use this material or content only as expressly authorised in writing by Us or Our licensors. You will not, and You will not assist or facilitate any third party to, copy, reproduce, transmit, distribute, frame, commercially exploit or create derivative works of such material or content. MSN and the MSN Logo are registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries and are used under license from Microsoft.
4.2 If You become aware of any such distribution or commercial exploitation, You agree to notify Us immediately.
The Sun used quotes more scarcely, but both entries are once more an example of MSM not respecting principles such as Copyright and Fair Use when it comes to their sources. And they have the guts to claim the intelligent property on these entries.
The fight between bloggers and journos will continue. Hopefully Murdoch and Co will soon opt for their paywalls.
Author: Franky Branckaute
Franky is CEO, Editor and 21/7 Muppet on Duty at Splashpress Media. Occasionally he even sleeps. More sporadically even he also blogs about the professional online life at iFranky. He also is regular Guest Lecturer on all things blogging and ‘web 2.0’ish’. Follow him on Twitter.
