When your words are not your own

Since the blogosphere took off in a big way, sometime in the early part of the last decade, blogs have had their detractors. Some criticisms are justified: the quality of both writing and content in some blogs is Not Good. There are far too many blogs out there which read like poorly-spelled shopping lists.

But others – that bloggers’ opinions are less valid than journalists’, simply because they’re not journalists – are less so. Of course, there’s the snobbery factor: that because journalists are paid for their writing, it must be worth paying for, therefore it must be better (this I’d dispute – I’ve had some shockingly put-together emails from journalists, whereas some friends’ blogs are screamingly well-written).

Of course, much of the criticism comes from the established media, which isn’t a surprise: all forms of social media are bringing about a sea change in the way we consume our news. Whatever your philosophical opinions on freedom of speech and the democracy of information, print journalists welcoming the advent of blogs and citizen journalists is a bit like cab horses welcoming the motor car.

Yet, when there is content that the established media likes, they apparently aren’t quite so quick to criticise… A couple of cases spring quickly to mind.

The first is that of Flickr user and photographer Peter Zabulis. Peter recently discovered that a photo of his – quite clearly a beautiful photo – had been used by the Independent newspaper without his permission. The ensuing exchange between Peter and an editor at the paper is available to see on Peter’s Flickr site – showing the Independent’s rather adamant stance that they had not breached Peter’s copyright. It took over a week for the Independent to apologise for the incident, and issue Peter with payment for the use of his photo.

And a case from this weekend shows that it’s not just photographers who should be wary about their content ending up in unexpected places.

Irish blogger and air traffic controller Melanie Schregardus has been the topic of much internet chatter this week, after the Irish Mail on Sunday printed a story based largely on a post she’d written on her blog.

In her own words, “The Mail never told me they were writing a piece about my blog. The journalist who wrote it never sent me an email asking me questions about my blog… [A]n article has appeared in a Sunday Newspaper that… gives me opinions that I do not have, and uses words I have never said. It does so to attack my profession, impugn my employers, and portray me as a victim of my friends.”

At best it’s naïve to believe that you can release words into the cyber-ether and expect them to stay private. But, as a blogger myself, I don’t think it’s too much to ask that even if material is in the public domain it should be credited to its creator. And just lifting copy wholesale is nothing more than lazy journalism. In a response, the Mail has argued that it tried to contact Melanie to inform her. However, a quick rootle round the net, and it does appear that the journalist didn’t try very hard to do so.

With the pace of change in the social media sphere overtaking so much else that underpins the ways we’ve been used to doing things, it’s inevitable that the lines between privacy, ownership and copyright should blur – and it’s something that the law will have to work to keep up with.

But in the meantime, bloggers should be aware that their words, whilst their own, may not stay that way; and journalists should consider whether they’d be so quick to lift someone else’s copy if it had previously appeared on the pages of a paper, rather than on the pages of a blog.

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