That Looks Familiar

These people have stolen chunks of Leon’s inter­view with The Del­ga­dos, edited the responses, inserted their own ques­tions, and passed it off as their own work. And they then have the cheek to thank Leon, rather than credit him.

I don’t get why some­one would do this - why not link to the full inter­view on this site if they liked it, or drop Leon a line asking if they can repub­lish it?

It’s not just bad form to nick some­one else’s con­tent, either: The Del­ga­dos agreed to be inter­viewed by Leon, they don’t even know that some­one is pub­lish­ing their answers to ques­tions they were never asked. If you see what I mean.

Update: The con­tents of this site are now licensed under a Cre­ative Com­mons licence, specif­i­cally the awk­wardly named Attribution-​NoDerivs-​NonCommercial 1.0. Say what? Here’s the basics:

1. Attri­bu­tion: The licen­sor per­mits others to copy, dis­trib­ute, dis­play, and per­form the work. In return, licensees must give the orig­i­nal author credit.
2. Non­com­mer­cial: The licen­sor per­mits others to copy, dis­trib­ute, dis­play, and per­form the work. In return, licensees may not use the work for com­mer­cial pur­poses — unless they get the licensor’s permission.
3. No Deriv­a­tive Works: The licen­sor per­mits others to copy, dis­trib­ute, dis­play and per­form only unal­tered copies of the work — not deriv­a­tive works based on it.

Quite restric­tive, but a lot nicer than copy­right (which, when push comes to shove, we retain over every­thing on here anyway!) I pre­vi­ously thought that putting some­thing like this on the site was pretty ridicu­lous, but if people are going to nick our stuff, we might as well make it clear what we con­sider acceptable.

Law geeks might like to read the licence in full.

Update II, an apol­ogy: Some of the above com­ments are unfair: our ire should have been directed at a con­trib­u­tor to the This Is Not TV site, one Craig Scott, rather than the site itself. Emma Farrer, who main­tains TINTV, accepted the inter­view in good faith, not know­ing that the sup­posed author was a pla­gia­rist, and has now apol­o­gised and removed the offend­ing page. Thanks very much for that Emma, and my apolo­gies for jump­ing the gun.

Posted at 12am on 28/01/03 by Jack Mottram to the web category.
Permalink · Add to del.icio.us