Bruni dines on Eater, leaves without paying

The New York Times Frank Bruni did something bad in his Diner's Journal yesterday, and he may not even understand how bad it was.

He wrote a story about the Eater blog's decision to spin its DeathWatch feature into a more positive "Rally Cry" to save a restaurant before it goes under.

He does link to the Eater post, which is good.

However, he then lifts and reprints four full paragraphs from Eater. 210 words. The entire post. Not cool at all. Illegal, one might say.

But then to rub salt in the wound, he basically tells his readers not to click over to Eater: "If you don’t feel like bopping through cyberspace over to the Eater web site, below is the text of the item. ..."

Pretty crappy that the big media company is telling its readers not to click over to a small, legitimate site that makes its living based on clicks. Instead, Bruni just steals the information in its entirety.

So one of the problems for eater is - how loudly do you complain? Because geez, it's nice to get any attention and traffic from the NY Times. However, they're actually entiteled to a whole lot more traffic then they're getting. But if you complain is he (and the paper) less likely to ever mention you again?

Ideally, Bruni should have excerpted a couple lines, and let his readers click through to Eater for the full post. I mean, it's one thing to discourage readers from clicking through if the target site has malicious popups, or if say you're writing a news story about something on the Aryan Nations website, but this isn't that.

And as you may guess, this problem isn't unique to Eater. And to be fair, this is a bit out of character for the NY Times. But I hate that a typical reader (or blogger) reads it in the NY Times and assumes that it's OK. And then they turn around and do the same thing. Same goes for pictures, people just think there's no such thing as copyright anymore or that you need to ask permission if you're going to reprint someone else's work.

Here's a good guide to fair use of photography online.

Earlier: Calling out thieving BuddyTV
'Courtesy of' my cold thieving hands
Bad attribution, British style
More NYT attribution - on a military law blog
On attribution, linking and fairness

Labels: media

- posted by Amy @ 11/12/2008 08:31:00 AM