A Guide to Happy (and Legal) Tumblr-ing by Luke O'Neil

• 

• TECHNOLOGY
• MAY 21, 2011

A Guide to Happy (and Legal) Tumblr-ing

Blogging without 'stealing' is much easier than you think

By LUKE O'NEIL

Information wants to be free. At least that appears to be the sentiment among bloggers, the majority of whom subscribe to a what's-mine-is-yours-and-what's-yours-is-mine policy (but mostly the latter part). By this point, the blogoverse has become a lot like what Picasso supposedly said about inspiration: A good artist copies, but a great artist steals.

Of course, back in his day you couldn't exactly right click on a canvas in a gallery and drag it over onto your bedroom wall, so what did he know?

Whether or not information should be free is a different matter altogether. On popular blogging platforms like Tumblr, the point is moot. For the bloggers who use these sites, the exchange of copyrighted material and intellectual property—other people's photographs, music, lists of all the amazing things you ate for lunch—isn't just an aspect of the form, it's practically the entire business model.

Brian Stauffer for The Wall Street Journal

Call it the copy(paste)right approach to creativity, where much of the allure is in reblogging posts from contacts in your network in an Internet version of the telephone game. Each repetition takes you further and further away from the work's original creator.

It doesn't have to be that way. There are services that make content available for bloggers to reuse on their own sites, free of thorny ethical issues and legal complications. Most bloggers aren't aware of these resources or don't seem to know what the appropriate standards actually are.

Posting a photograph that belongs to someone else, for example, even with attribution and a link is illegal if done without the author's authorization. I know, really scary right? No, the Internet police probably aren't going to be kicking down your door to ask questions about that copyrighted photo of Ke$ha you just posted, but when it's almost as easy to do things the right way, why not at least try?

"It's a willful ignorance," says Bert Krages, a Portland, Ore., lawyer who specializes in intellectual property issues, and has written "Legal Handbook for Photographers: The Rights and Liabilities of Making Images." He says, "A lot of people are disinclined to find out what their legal obligations are for fear of finding out they aren't as broad as they think."

Posting someone else's intellectual property on your blog basically comes down to stealing, says Mr. Krages, particularly when it comes to professional photographers. "Even a minor usage of a photo on a blog can destroy the value of an image with regard to licensing it for other uses."

There are a few ways to lessen your unlawful-blogging footprint, though. Much like a chef who cooks with only the happiest free-range chickens, there's such a thing as ethical blogging as well. Here's how:

Use Creative Commons

One of the most bountiful and convenient ways to ensure you're blogging with a clear conscience is to utilize services that operate under a Creative Commons license. Creative Commons is an organization that works with websites like Flickr, Picasa, Vimeo, SoundCloud and Scribd, as well as individual producers of creative content, to provide standardized and streamlined licensing solutions under a variety of different permission levels. "We want information to be free when the people who have created the content want it to be free, and to have an easy way to make it free under their terms," says Eric Steuer, Creative Commons's creative director.

Get content from sites like Flickr

Flickr alone has some 100 million images that are available to use under sharing guidelines. Picasa, another vast photo database, owned by Google, also offers the option to search for photos that are free to use by bloggers. Other smaller, more creativity-focused sites like moregueFile are sprouting up now as well.

"The purpose of the site has been for allowing people to use images in the least restrictive way," says Johannes Seemann, morgueFile's business lead.

While photos make up the majority of reblogged content, music, video and large pieces of other people's writing also regularly show up. Like Flickr and Picasa do for photos, sites like SoundCloud, Vimeo, Blip.tv, SpinXpress and Wikimedia Commons offer more writing, songs and video than you could ever possibly use.

Refine your Web searches

If you're looking for the right photo to match an essay on your blog, take the extra step to enable a customized Creative Commons search. From Google.com select "advanced search." From there, click "usage rights." Searches can then be further narrowed down with options like "free to use or share." Or simply go to search.creativecommons.org where you can find content that's been approved for commercial use or further modification and tweaking. Yes, this is the Internet, where suffering through five extra seconds is an eternity, but like anything else that's good for you, once you get in the habit, it will become second nature.

Ask nicely

Perhaps the best advice for bloggers is to simply be mindful of where their content is coming from. You'd be surprised how far a little common courtesy will get you.

"The best thing to do is let the photographer know that you would like to use their image," says Zack Sheppard, senior community manager at Flickr. "Photographers are often happy to have their image used on a blog without asking a fee."

When in doubt, cite your source

As Katherine Barna, Tumblr's director of communications, puts it, "Be fair. Use proper credit and attribution if sharing content that wasn't originated by you."

"Reputational currency is important," says Mr. Steuer of Creative Commons. "Do the best job you can to attribute it to the person that created the content, linking back, saying their name." It won't get you off the hook legally, but compared to no attribution, it's a start. You'll appreciate it when your own blog gets big and the credit comes back around.

Read more: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703421204576327761347965794.html#ixzz1MyOZ1rR6

The Death of Journalism (Gawker Edition)By Ian Shapira

The Death of Journalism (Gawker Edition)By Ian Shapira
Sunday, August 2, 2009

A few weeks ago, I scored what passes these days for one of journalism's biggest coups, satisfying a holy writ for newspaper impact in the Internet age. Gawker, the snarky New York culture and media Web site, had just blogged about my story in that day's Washington Post.

I confess to feeling a bit triumphant. My article was ripe fodder for the blogosphere's thrash-and-bash attitude: a profile of a Washington-based "business coach," Anne Loehr, who charges her early-Gen-X/Boomer clients anywhere from $500 to $2,500 to explain how the millennial generation (mostly people in their 20s and late teens) behaves in the workplace. Gawker's story featured several quotations from the coach and a client, and neatly distilled Loehr's biography -- information entirely plucked from my piece. I was flattered.

But when I told my editor, he wrote back: They stole your story. Where's your outrage, man?

* * *

The more I toggled between my editor's e-mail and the eight-paragraph Gawker item, the angrier I got, and the more disenchanted I became with the journalism business. I enjoy reading Gawker and the growing number of news sites like it -- the Huffington Post, the Daily Beast and others -- but lately they're making me even more nervous about my precarious career as a newspaper reporter who enjoys, at least for the time being, a salary, a 401(k) and health insurance.

I started thinking about all the labor that went into producing my 1,500-word article. The story wasn't Pulitzer material; it was just a reported look at one person capitalizing on angst in the workplace. With all the pontificating about the future of newspapers both in the media and in Capitol Hill hearings, I began wondering if most readers know exactly what is required to assemble a feature story for a publication such as The Post. Journalism at a major newspaper is different from what's usually required in the wild and riffy world of the Internet. And that wild world is killing real reporting -- the kind of work practiced not just by newspapers but by nonprofits, some blogs and other news outlets.

Gawker's version of my story, headlined " 'Generational Consultant' Holds America's Fakest Job," begins by telling its readers to "Meet Anne Loehr" -- with a link to my story but no direct mention of The Post. It then condenses her biography: "Loehr is 44. She spent the entire decade of the 90s running hotel and safari operations in Kenya." That's information I got after an hour-plus phone call with Loehr and typing out 3,000 words of notes.

The bulk of the posting consists of Loehr's own words, her thoughts on this generation's affinity for reality television and its supposed aversion to Nike products. (Still no mention of The Post.) For those little nuggets, I drove a half-hour to Fairfax County's Tower Club, and attended her two-hour "Get Wise with Gen Ys" session and recorded it.

Then the work got painstaking: It took about four hours to transcribe the session. (Are you playing mournful melodies on your violin yet?)

After the quotations from Loehr, the Gawker posting is a cut-and-paste of my own stuff, a description of why a financial adviser attended (so she can work better with clients who are "trust fund babies," she said). Still no attribution to The Post.

The eighth and last paragraph discusses and links to Loehr's "generational cheat sheet" on our Web site. Finally, beneath the last paragraph, the hyperlinked words "Washington Post" appear in red. Would the average visitor have clicked on the link to read the whole story? I probably wouldn't have.

After all the reporting, it took me about a day to write the 1,500-word piece. How long did it take Gawker to rewrite and republish it, cherry-pick the funniest quotes, sell ads against it and ultimately reap 9,500 (and counting) page views?

I called up Hamilton Nolan, the Gawker writer to whom I had been so grateful. "Probably took me," he said, "you know . . . a half-hour to an hour."

* * *

After I first saw Nolan's post, I shifted into modern self-promotional reporter mode, trying my best to keep spreading the story into the digital ether. I posted the story on my Facebook page and tweeted it on Twitter with all the appropriate symbols: "Gawker has a great posting on my #WashPost story on the #millennial guru." I hadn't had my outrage stoked by my editor yet and was still happy for the attention.

Gawker was the second-biggest referrer of visitors to my story online. (No. 1 was the "Today's Papers" feature on Slate, which is owned by The Post.) Though some readers got their fill of Loehr and never clicked the link to my story, others found their way to my piece only by way of Gawker.

Even if I owe Nolan for a significant uptick in traffic, are those extra eyeballs helping The Post's bottom line?

More readers are better than fewer, of course. But those referring links -- while essential to our current business model -- aren't doing much, ultimately, to stop our potential slide into layoffs and further contraction. Worse, some media experts believe that Gawker and its ilk, with their relatively low overhead, might be depressing online ad revenue across the board. That makes it harder for news-gathering operations to recoup their expenses.

The Post just completed its fourth round of buyouts since 2003; and although the company reported on Friday that it had returned to profitability in the second quarter, the newspaper division, which is pretty much us, continues losing money. Standard & Poor's expects that the company's gross earnings will drop by 30 percent this year. Gawker Media, on the other hand, reported last week that its revenues in the first two quarters of 2009 were up 45 percent from the first two quarters of last year.

David Marburger is a First Amendment lawyer who, along with his economist brother Daniel, is stirring a minor controversy in the blogosphere with a proposal that might empower newspapers, or any news organization that spends the bulk of its budget on original reporting. They want to amend the copyright law so that it restores "unfair competition rights" -- which once gave us the power to sue rivals if our stories were being pirated. That change would give news organizations rights that they could enforce in court if "parasitic" free-rider Web sites (the heavy excerpters) refused to bargain with them for a fee or a contract. Marburger said media outlets could seek an order requiring the free-rider to postpone its commercial use or even hand over some advertising revenue linked to the free-riding.

News organizations once had such protections against the replication and resale of their work because of a wire service showdown in the early 20th century. In 1918, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Associated Press in a complaint against a rival wire service that had been ripping off its stories, Marburger said.

When Congress was revising copyright laws in 1976, it decided to abolish all other laws that functioned like copyright, while maintaining an exception for that Supreme Court ruling. The Justice Department objected to keeping the ruling alive, arguing that it gave media organizations a "boundless monopoly" over the news of the day. Congress then dropped the exception.

Current law basically allows the Gawkers of the world to appropriate others' work, repurpose it and sell ads against it with no payment to or legal recourse for the company that paid me while I sat through two hours of a generational seminar.

Marburger compared my article and the Gawker posting and concluded: "This is what in our opinion is a huge contributor to the demise of those who are originating news reports. If you don't change the law to stop this, originators of news reports cannot survive."

That may be far-fetched. And after all, newspapers aren't entirely unwitting victims; they knew about the Internet very early, knew about the power of the Drudge Report in the 1990s and failed to innovate.

The Washington Post Web site has successfully sued several media companies, including Total News, Free Republic, GoSMS and Gator Corp., for exploiting Post content (and in several cases, selling ads against Post material). In a statement, Post general counsel Eric N. Lieberman said: "In general, we believe that there is a very important line between appropriate quoting and linking, which contributes to free expression, and inappropriate free-riding, which diminishes free expression."

Recently, the Associated Press announced that it will track illegitimate uses of its articles online; and a California startup, Attributor, has devised a new way for newspapers to share in the ad revenue from any site that copies their articles, although the idea needs cooperation from big ad networks to succeed.

Nick Denton, the founder of Gawker Media, which owns not only Gawker but sports and technology blogs such as Deadspin and Gizmodo, told me that he'd "love to shut down or charge" the Twitter aggregators and spam blogs that reprint his company's stories and headlines. But newspapers, he said, are not sin-free, either. "I'd like newspapers to pay us too, while we're at it," he told me over Gmail chat. "For instance, the New York Post lifted our Deadspin story on [ESPN reporter] Erin Andrews and splashed it on their front page. A brief credit -- but they didn't even link from the web version."

So Denton balks at the appropriation of his reporter's work about the illicit videotaping of a popular sports reporter. But what about Gawker's riff on my Post story?

"That was certainly more of an excerpt than we'd normally indulge in," he said.

* * *

The popular saying in the industry now is that it's important to "save journalism" -- not necessarily newspapers. I agree, but newspapers are still the most common organizations that pay a large staff of reporters, providing them with a living wage, health care and a retirement plan.

Nolan, 29, the Gawker writer, told me he feels he has hit a ceiling in the business. "It used to be that people would get a job at Gawker, do it for a year, then go off and get a great job at New York magazine," Nolan said. "Now those jobs are gone, and I feel like there is nowhere to aspire to. But I'm pretty happy."

Nolan, who is considered an independent contractor, gets paid $4,000 a month, and thanks to Denton's acknowledgement that people should have incentives to make an impact, he gets bonuses for exceeding his Web traffic expectations. Does he see the Catch-22 he's inflicting on himself -- and everyone else? "I don't generally feel bad about doing this. I am trying to put in a highlight reel of the stories. It's like doing movie previews," he said.

After talking with Denton, Nolan and others for this article, I still want a fluid blogosphere, but one where aggregators -- newspapers included -- are more transparent about whom they're heavily excerpting. They should mention the original source immediately. And if bloggers want to excerpt at length, a fee would be the nice, ethical gesture.

So, Gawker, do me a favor. At least blog this piece. I'll even write a headline for you (free of charge). How about: "Whiny WashPost Reporter Makes His Point: Respect the Genuine Article"? Oh -- one other thing. If you sell ads against your posting, can you cut The Post a check?

shapirai@washpost.com

Ian Shapira is a local reporter for The Washington Post who writes about the millennial generation. He will be online to chat with readers at 11 a.m. Tuesday. Submit your questions before or during the discussion.

Making Use of Public Domain By J.D. BIERSDORFER

November 20, 2008
Q & A
Making Use of Public Domain By J.D. BIERSDORFER
Q. What does it mean when a Web site says a picture or document is in the public domain? Does that mean I can use it for my own purposes?

A. The public domain is a category of works made up of text, images and documents that are not protected by an active legal copyright. On the Internet, material in the public domain can be freely downloaded, copied and reused.

Just because a photo or document is available online does not mean it is automatically in the public domain, so check for copyright notices or a Creative Commons license before grabbing something to reuse. (A Creative Commons license works alongside a copyright and allows writers and artists more flexibility in sharing their creations with the world; more information is at www.creativecommons.org.)

Creative material usually ends up in the public domain in one of two ways. Some creators give up their copyright and donate their work to the public domain. For example, there are several picture sites around the Web like www.burningwell.org that offer collections of public domain photographs. Wikipedia has a list of links to copyright-free images at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain_image_resources.

Works can also fall into the public domain if their copyright has expired. In general, books published before 1923 in the United States are considered in the public domain. The Tarzan tales of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Shakespeare’s plays, essays by Samuel Johnson and novels by Jane Austen are among the free literary offerings at Project Gutenberg (www.gutenberg.us) and other sites devoted to sharing public domain text. Federal publications and other government documents are not copyrighted and are also in the public domain.

The Incredible Art Department site has a page of links to public domain text and images (as well as links to several sites devoted to copyright law) at www.princetonol.com/groups/iad/links/clipart.html. A chart at www.copyright.cornell.edu/public_domain explains copyright term and the public domain as of Jan. 1, 2008.

Ruling Is a Victory for Supporters of Free Software

August 14, 2008
Ruling Is a Victory for Supporters of Free Software
By JOHN MARKOFF
SAN FRANCISCO — A legal dispute involving model railroad hobbyists has resulted in a major courtroom victory for the free software movement also known as open-source software.
In a ruling Wednesday, the federal appeals court in Washington said that just because a software programmer gave his work away did not mean it could not be protected.
The decision legitimizes the use of commercial contracts for the distribution of computer software and digital artistic works for the public good. The court ruling also bolsters the open-source movement by easing the concerns of large organizations about relying on free software from hobbyists and hackers who have freely contributed time and energy without pay.
It also has implications for the Creative Commons license, a framework for modifying and sharing creative works that was developed in 2002 by Larry Lessig, a law professor at Stanford.
That license is now used widely by organizations like M.I.T. for distributing courseware, and Wikipedia, the Web-based encyclopedia. In March, the rock band Nine Inch Nails released a collection of musical tracks under a Creative Commons license.
The ambiguity facing open-source licensing has been one of the hurdles facing the movement, said Joichi Ito, the chief executive of Creative Commons.
“From a practical business perspective when big companies and their legal teams look at Creative Commons there are a number of questions,” he said. “It’s been one of the things their legal teams throw at us.”
The appeals court decision reverses a San Francisco federal court ruling over the misappropriation of a software program by a company that publishes model train hobbyist software.
The free software, or open source, community has quarreled for several years with Matthew A. Katzer, a Portland, Ore., businessman who owns Kam Industries. Previously, Mr. Katzer has sued free software developers for patent infringement and the free software community has argued that he had failed to disclose earlier technology, known as prior art, in his patent filings.
A lawyer for Mr. Katzer did not return calls asking for comment.
In March 2006, Robert G. Jacobsen, a physics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, filed a lawsuit against Mr. Katzer claiming that his company was distributing a commercial software program that had taken software code from the Java Model Railroad Interface project and was redistributing the program without the credits required as part of the open-source license it was distributed under.
The decision to appeal the lower court ruling, which said that the terms of the open-source contract were overly broad, was intensely debated within the free software movement. Some open-source advocates had worried that a loss before the appeals court would have been a disaster for the community, which has grown as an economic force during the last quarter century.
“I was terrified that we would lose,” Mr. Jacobsen said. “But I thought it was the right thing to do.”
There has long been a link between model train hobbyists and the free software movement. During the 1950s, for example, hobbyists who worked on the wiring of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology model railroad club project were informally known as “hackers,” according to “Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution” by Steven Levy. The term evolved to include people who developed and programmed computers and who passionately believed that software codes should be freely shared.
Mr. Jacobsen said he believed that the court’s ruling was significant for the free software movement because it had thrived not on monetary gain but on individual credit for contributions.
“We don’t charge for this and so all we really get is credit,” he said, adding that anyone is free to use and modify the programming instructions created by his group as long as they retain the credit and distribute them with the programmer’s instructions.