Pasting newspapers' stories onto your site: Is it legal?

I interfaced with our techies about watermarking, all that stuff.
The software they use for the chain's blogs won't let us do it. It's crappy software, and not very Mac friendly, with tons of bugs I keep running into. But that's what they chose.
My other option is to take every photo, import it into photobucket, add a text credit on it, and upload it back into the blog's media gallery.
Not gonna happen. Spend too much time on it as it is.

I have no issue with them linking. Quite the opposite. That helps. It's the flat-out theft that just strikes a chord.

 

Agreed. I had a photo lifted by a high school sports web site around here that writes its own copy but doesn't do photography. I e-mailed them in the fall when they used it for a feature story and asked them to either give me credit or take it down. They gave me credit.

Then they used the same photo again in a recruiting story last month. I again e-mailed and made the same request. This time they just took it down. The best part is I found another (smaller and less read) web site that actually lifted the photo off the web site that originally lifted it from me. Who thinks this kind of stuff is OK?

 

Do you use Limewire or Bittorrent, or did you use Napster back in the day?

 

I've never worked for a website, but there has to be some sort of law against this, doesn't there? Otherwise, Deadspin could just become the Washington Post sports section (of course, not that anyone would read it).

 

One team I cover has their own website and often copies my stories onto it. I told them earlier this season that anything i write was legally the property of the publication and it was up to the publication if they wanted to enforce copyright.

Personally, it didn't bother me in the least and the paper either didn't know/care. I see this stuff happening more and more.

It's real cheap to start up a website, but getting decent content is another matter. So they plagarize the hell out of stuff. Oh, well, at least they aren't charging users a fee to read it.

 

Acquisition. And definitely Napster way back when. I must be missing a joke here.

Edit: Ah, I see what you're getting at, took me a second. I haven't illegally downloaded music in years. But since I downloaded a few songs in college that makes it OK for them to take a photo of mine?

I guess I should've listened to that Usher song I downloaded for free: "Be careful who you do, cuz karma comes back around." Thanks for showing me the error of my ways.

 

I don't think it's okay to steal, but we live in a culture where there is no respect for intellectual property. Now I don't think there was any respect for it in the past, but it was a lot harder to steal it. Think about copyright in the 19th Century. American publishers could rip off European authors and not have to pay a cent in royalties.