Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HanlonsRazor

Question: What is the mathematical formula to calculate the area of a flat circle?

Right answer: Pi x Radius squared
Wrong answer: Pi + radius cubed
Not even wrong: *picture of a pie inside a square*

Someone who doesn’t even grasp the fundamentals to make even the first step towards any appropriate (even incorrect) solution can be said to be “not even wrong”.

The Daily Fail took a CC-licensed image (which is a copyright license in itself) and… just changed the photo’s copyright license, and then attributed that copyright to CC itself. If that still falls into “wrong” for you, I suppose that’s a good thing, because “not even wrong” would then require the DM to sue the original photographer for hosting their own photo since it’d been “copywritten” by the CC courtesy of the DM.

And, it’s been pointed out that it’s likely a near-automatic template that just stamps the watermark on their images. But it’s also something that they’ve been doing for years and have done nothing to address repeated complaints about their complete disregard for the proper way to display a CC license notice on a work. That counts as intentional, by this point.

I can’t imagine they give a toss.

1) Creative Commons is unique in a way that makes a difference here – this isn’t like misattributing copyright to Disney (who has copyright on plenty of things, just not this image), it’s misattributing copyright to CC who never even tries to have copyright on any content. Sure, they could, but they’re still qualitatively different.

2) As has been posted above, the DM has been told many times about this bad habit of theirs, and they seem not to care.

2) One possible explanation for the error(a) in the Mail’s publication is that they likely have a database entry for photos and that one of the fields is a copyright field which is either not programmed to display CC entries correctly or which was used incorrectly by the person uploading the photo. I doubt it was intentional.

More than likely somebody tried to do the right thing, but didn’t have time to read up…

Well, the second half of that sounds quite right for the DM, but the first half not so much.

They cause much laughter by posting articles about Charlotte O’Hara and Red Butler in Gone With The Wind. Or showing a photo of two people in a coach and captioning it as Queen Victoria and Tsar Alexander II on the eve of WWI.

They’re quite famous for not even bothering to check Wikipedia. And also for hiring writers who would have failed seventh grade in most school systems.

If they were American I would wish for a big fat educational lawsuit, but I won’t pretend to understand the British legal system.

More than likely somebody tried to do the right thing, but didn’t have time to read up legalese on exactly what text mass he should copy paste on top of the image.

However, this has been pointed out to them on numerous occasions and nothing has been done to fix it.

I’m really surprised nobody has ever taken the Daily Mail to court for wrong copyright attribution. Whenever they take pictures from a Twitter account, they’ll put (C) Twitter. Pictures taken from Facebook, (C) Facebook.

I see what they’re *trying* to do, but they seem unwilling or unable to fix it.

I took this issue up with the PCC – a bad choice given that Dacre sits as its chair – and was told that it was a legal and not something that the PCC could intervene with.

It’s just wrong on multiple levels.