Too Cool for Internet Explorer

Thursday, July 8, 2004

Were We Wronged?

Recently, I was looking around at sites that had linked to my blog (yes, I admit it—I was vanity surfing). In doing so, I discovered a site that covers things going on in Las Vegas (I’m choosing not to identify it). This site had chosen to take an article from ATPM that was written by my friend, Andy, about this year’s National Association of Broadcasters Convention and reproduce it on their site.

They didn’t change a thing and they did fully credit Andy as the copyright owner. The problem is, this isn’t the correct attribution. ATPM, as well as the author, should’ve been credited.

Case in point, if ATPM chose to run an unmodified Macworld feature article and only attributed the author—not the magazine—and didn’t even ask Macworld for permission, there’d be hell to pay. Right?

To this site’s credit, upon requesting the article be removed, the reply I received was that a request for permission was made, but no reply received. I’m following up on that, but just because someone doesn’t answer doesn’t automatically mean you can copy it. In addition, the person who replied mentioned in his justification of reproducing the article that “greater exposure has done you no harm.” Ah, but he’s mistaken. Since ATPM wasn’t mentioned, there was no exposure for us. We’d rather have the traffic on the ATPM site. The site gets revenue from the ad banners. ATPM’s blue apple logo was put at the bottom of the article but, of course, only people familiar with ATPM will know what that means. ATPM’s name was never given. They didn’t even link the graphic to ATPM’s site!

By the way—no, Andy did not get a permission request, either.

I’d really like to know your take on this. Please select one of the poll options or rattle out a comment if you have thoughts I haven’t covered in the poll.