Can you contribute others' posts?
Yesterday, the Malay Mail published both ShaolinTiger and my posts about “PR and bloggers” side by side in a contrapuntal article entitled “Battle for the Internet mind”. Shaolintiger posted about this on his blog, attracting many replies screaming plagiarism, copyright-infringement or the like.
Technically, it isn’t plagiarism, because its attributed to us. It’s possibly copyright infringement, because we weren’t asked or informed. But here’s a slight loophole, that I’ve had at the back of my mind thinking:
The whole page is framed as a reader-contributed page where the Malay Mail asks readers to send in links to anything interesting they’ve seen on the Net. So technically, it isn’t the Malay Mail that’s willfully taking and publishing blogposts, right? Readers contributed them.
I’m not a lawyer, so I’m really asking an open question about the legality of this?
Personally, I wouldn’t even have needed to be asked permission (permission is over-rated). But it’d have been nice to just get an email from The Malay Mail telling me:
“Hi David, we loved your post on this and this, so we’re going to run it in tomorrow’s newspaper. Thought we’d let you know. Oh, and don’t worry about running out to get a copy, we’ll send you a complimentary copy.”
It doesn’t hurt to be nice, you know?
On another note, in today’s connected society, is the culture of taking and re-purposing something that’s become a norm? I can embed any YouTube video I want without asking the person who posted the video in the first place. Can the Malay Mail ‘embed’ my blog into their newspaper too?
I guess that’s another discussion altogether.
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