The newspaper industry has a serious public relations problem right now. Their business model is crumbling and they’re blaming everyone from Google to amateur bloggers. They don’t seem to understand the difference between commercial and non-commercial publishing. And now, The Daily Telegraph seems to feel they have the right to steal copyrighted photographs from a professional photographer, and what’s worse, it took an angry complaint to even get them to add a credit.
Maciej Dakowicz has created a startling and depressing body of work on late night debauchery on St. Mary’s St. in Cardiff. The work truly makes you believe that this street represents the end of western civilization. The work has been blogged and picked up by a few random websites. I’m not going to link them however because in most cases they’ve failed to credit Maciej.
And now The Daily Telegraph, a major commercial newspaper has picked up the photographs and feels that they can publish them without compensating Maciej. What makes it worse is that there’s a big fat ad from HP staring you in the face right when view the essay. This is beyond fucked up.
You can follow the discussion as it happened over at HCSP. It’s possible I’m missing some of the story at this point, and I’m guessing there are some discussions happening between Maciej and The Telegraph, but regardless, how can this be legal under any circumstances? What am I missing? The Daily Telegraph publishes content on the web and generates revenue from advertising and subscriptions. Just because the photographs have been circulated on blogs doesn’t make them fair game.
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