Last week, I covered the opening of Portland's Cannabis Cafe, the first in the nation. The story went viral, and all kinds of people read it from our Web site. Others, however, abided by the rule of the Internet, which is that there are no rules. If you want something, take it. And a blogger from a "progressive" Web site did that with my story last week. Our Internet king wrote a scathing cease-and-desist. This was the smug worm's response:
We have removed the material, but I can't imagine for the world why you
would want us to do so. We are a noncommercial operation published by a
nonprofit corporation and nobody is gaining financially from the use of this
material.
Most of what we publish is original but we do repost some information from
other sites that we believe would be of interest to our readers and that we
feel deserves wider dissemination. In the two years I have edited The Rag
Blog I can remember only one other such request to remove something we have
posted, and that concerned a photograph.
We ran a portion of the article from the Oregonian as a sidebar to another
piece. We credited it and included a link to the original piece. It would
seem to me that could only result in wider visibility for you and, in any
event, I cannot imagine in what way you would feel harmed by this use.
But many things in this world remain a mystery to me!
Regards,
Does anyone else see a problem here? Theft remains a mystery to him. And there's no stopping him and his kind.
2 comments:
the majority of my working life was spent in music publishing, so i'm no stranger to issues surrpounding intellectual property rights. as with the record business, the toll booth for access to journalism is situated on a site that travellors in cyberspace have little cause to visit - namely, the distribution nodes of brick-and-retail and paywalls. the sitch for publishers of journalism is complicated by related disruptions to the supply of that stuff they sell to advertisers, i.e. the attention of consumers. (I realise i'm using 80+ words to point out stuff you already know, but bear with me.) I've no doubt Mr. Wurm is downplaying the size of the "portion" of your piece that he put onine, otherwise you and your web editor wouldn't be so steamed. don't be so hard on the guy tho, because if he'd merely pulled a couple of salient quotes along his with citation and a link, he'd have been sharing some attention with you-all without any loss to The O. I realize i'm setting myself up for the classic "you can die of exposure" rejoiner, but in the era of digital networks the attention economy is paramount, and there are tools to monetize it. For some time i've been subscribed to an aggregator called Issu which grants access to local journalism from far flung places in exchange for a monthly fee. It suggests to me the utility of a collective blanket licensing system for local/regional media co's, with division of the kitty determined by use. (p.s. i noticed my other comment reprented me via a gmail account. fyi my regular email is dkershaw@sympatico, and the "d" stands for dan.)
p.p.s. sorry about the typos! i very much dislike typing that involves thumbs.
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