Calling out thieving BuddyTV

I didn't plan on naming names, but Buddy TV didn't have the courtesy to even e-mail an apology, so I'm throwing down. It's among a number of sites that have treated my silly Real World Brooklyn street sightings picture as if it was a freebie handout from the network.

They used the picture fairly big, noted in the text that it was from NewYorkology and added a "courtesy of NewYorkology" credit. Cheekily, no hotlink. Hello, this is the Internet, right? If you're running a website (especially one with a big editorial staff, mega-traffic and you brag about your biz-school pedigrees,) you should probably know that links are a form of online currency. Lifting a copyright image without permission is one thing. Lifting the image and not giving credit and a link to the source is far worse.

I e-mailed Buddy TV this morning -- and their response was to not reply to my e-mail. However, they've taken down the picture and removed the "courtesy of NewYorkology" as well.

I'm sure there's a good legal case to be made that the highest value of the picture was the first eight hours it went live on their site, and that taking it down does not remove the greatest part of the harm done.

In the past two weeks I've had to ask several sites to add attribution to those Real World pictures -- and most have been at least apologetic and have complied. One of the big-gun blogs was slow, whiny and pathetic and at one point hotlinked the "NewYorkology" photo credit to their own internal URL -- and then got snotty with me for not e-mailing the specific author of that specific post, rather than oh, you know, the editor at the site who didn't credit me a week earlier on the same picture.

By comparison - one newspaper site contacted me to buy some of the pictures to use in print, and another newspaper e-mailed asking to reprint them on the paper's blog - with a link and credit, thank you.

Earlier: 'Courtesy of' my cold thieving hands

Labels: brooklyn, media, red hook

- posted by Amy @ 8/28/2008 02:54:00 PM