So the ghastly Dail Mail lifts whole stories from JonnyB, publishes them without attribution or compensation, and then, when caught out by said intrepid blogger, goes ”Oops!” and pays him some moolah.
That’s all fine and good, and blah blah blah.
Then they add this little snippet to their letter of apology to him:
“We generally take the view that blogs published on the internet have already been placed in the public domain by their authors and, in case of amateur writers, most people are happy to have their work recognised and displayed to a wider audience.”
Let me parse that one for you:
...means that anything published in the Internet can be lifted at any time, without attribution, as it’s “in the public domain”. Goody. That means that I can lift and use pics from the Mail without attribution in the future.“blogs published on the internet have already been placed in the public domain by their authors”
...meaning that you amateur plebeians should be grateful that we, the Mighty Lords Of Publishing, even bothered to take notice of you.“in case of amateur writers, most people are happy to have their work recognised and displayed to a wider audience.”
The original title for this post was “Condescending Assholes”, but I’m trying to keep it clean, a little.
Scorecard for the Daily Mail so far: invent stuff for articles; steal blogger material to use in an article.
Not bad, for a single week’s work.
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