How the vile Daily Mail handles Creative Commons licenses

That's so messed up, it's not even wrong.

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

MORE: aaronsw • cc • newspapers • photos • uk

More at Boing Boing

Eurovision 2013: An American in London

The technology that links taxonomy and Star Trek

http://twitter.com/openfly ǝɔʎoſ ʇʇɐW

I don’t get it.
- Donald Hayward
  
  It’s wrong because the way the copyright notice is shown, it implies that the company called “Creative Commons” owns the copyright to the image.
  
  But it’s “not even wrong” because the symbology is so inappropriate that it can’t even be interpreted in a meaningful enough way to make a correction to it.
  - http://twitter.com/openfly ǝɔʎoſ ʇʇɐW
    
    Oh. Thanks for the explanation. Totally did not get that. I was very confused.
  - ocker3
    
    I suspect they’re supposed to put who the picture’s copyright belongs to in that spot. Considering the subject, they found a cc-licensed image and used that, quite clever I reckon. I see exactly where they were going.
shutz

Is it because it basically says, in the bottom-left corner, “Copyright: Creative Commons” ?

Like some kind of oxymoron?
- Cowicide
  
  That and it’s kind of a double-whammy considering the guy in the picture (Aaron Swartz) was one of the architects of Creative Commons and they’re probably talking about his death with that picture.
  
  It’s just wrong on multiple levels.
http://twitter.com/the_damned_fool the damned fool

Because this image is used by Daily Mail (a money making enterprise) while use by them keeps the same tag on the bottom left of the photo. And everyone should know that a mainstay of Mr. Swartz’s philosophy was that information shouldn’t be held captive.
- unit_1421
  
  I’m sure it was done on purpose as a middle finger gesture.
  - http://twitter.com/the_damned_fool the damned fool
    
    The “not wrong” post being a middle finger meaning “keep it free”…bird?
  - http://newstechnica.com David Gerard
    
    No, the Daily Mail is stupendously good at not even thinking that far when it’s nicking photos.
unit_1421

Wasn’t there a “Free Bird Seed” sign in background?
Jake0748

I used to believe that people weren’t ever intentionally evil. (Like Snidely Whiplash or any of the James Bond or Batman villains). They just didn’t get what they were doing or were clueless or psycho- or socio-pathic.

But when I see shit like this, I have to wonder.

People actually enjoy twisting the truth, rubbing the tragic death of someone in people’s faces, and making a mockery of what so many believe is right and just? They do this what… for fun? for money, WHAT?
- foobar
  
  Do you enjoy sticking it to the Westboro Baptist Church?
  - Jake0748
    
    Um… no? Not sure I’m enjoying anything about anything related to this subject right now? What do you mean?
    
    Edit: If your point is, do I think the WBC is evil, of course they are. But THEY don’t think they are. They are just lawsuit-happy money-grubbers far as I can see.
    - foobar
      
      That’s kind of the point. You like making a mockery of what they think is right and just. Why should you be surprised if others feel the same way?
      - Jake0748
        
        Where in the world do you get the idea that I enjoy making a mockery of anybody? I truly love to argue and question those I disagree with. But I totally get that mockery and dismissive-ness are unproductive.
      - foobar
        
        Fair enough. I certainly enjoy mocking the WBC.
- http://www.facebook.com/steven.rowlinson Steven Rowlinson
  
  Sadly, Hanlon’s Razor can never be discounted:
  
  http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HanlonsRazor
http://benlk.com/ Ben Keith

This attribution is “not even wrong” because of how The Daily Mail attributes the image: Copyright Creative Commons. What the Daily Mail should’ve done is something along the lines of “Copyright $owner, Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 License”. By misattributing it to the Creative Commons, they ignore the Creative Commons license’s attribution terms. Then they compound this by attributing it to the Creative Commons organization itself. The Creative Commons doesn’t claim any sort of copyright over Creative-Commons-licensed content; in fact they specifically disclaim it. The only relationship between the Creative Commons and Creative-Commons-licensed content is that the Creative Commons has copyright over the Creative Commons License.
bolamig

With all due respect, this is in fact completely, demonstrably wrong.
http://pieceoplastic.com Jan Zuppinger

this is a photo by jacob applebaum that was released under a CC-BY license, did they at least also attribute it to the author, which is what the BY stands for? nope. fail. Incidentally, boingboing should of course do this as well here and properly attibute the image they post here to its author.
Jeremy LaGant

For some reason, people have different ideas of what is wrong, despite overwhelming evidence.
NateXT

Never attribute to malice that which etc…..
http://www.drake.org.uk Martyn Drake

I’ve been pointing this out for years. :

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.
- bumblebeeeeeee
  
  so it’s probably just automatically inserted.
  - http://www.drake.org.uk Martyn Drake
    
    Yes, I imagine they just enter the name of the source of where they obtained the photo and it’ll watermark it.
    
    However, this has been pointed out to them on numerous occasions and nothing has been done to fix it.
    - bumblebeeeeeee
      
      what has watermarking got to do with this? Think you mean by-line / credit.
      
      I can’t imagine they give a toss.
      - http://www.drake.org.uk Martyn Drake
        
        It’s watermarked – the “attribution” is stamped into the image rather than simply carried underneath in plain text.
- dspl
  
  I think they’re lazy and don’t care; they probably think: ”Eh, good enough (to keep us out of trouble)”.
- http://www.facebook.com/TimeNinja Richard Colletta
  
  That’s just stupid, vapid and lazy. For the love of god, if there’s one thing I can’t stand (being a reporter myself) is a reporter too lazy to properly attribute and reference their sources for both information and photos.
Bloodboiler

I find it hard to believe that the Daily Mail came up such a subtle insult to the geeks that geeks have to explain it to each other.

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.
- Boundegar
  
  Except see above. They’ve been doing it for ages. People complain, and they continue doing it wrong. And they presumably have staff attorneys, so it couldn’t possibly be accidental at this point.
  
  If they were American I would wish for a big fat educational lawsuit, but I won’t pretend to understand the British legal system.
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  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.
http://twitter.com/magicmadzik Madzia

Plenty of websites will write ‘Image source: Flickr’ instead. I’ve given up on emailing them about that.
Grahamers2002

1) “Not even wrong” is being used incorrectly. As the linked article explains, “not even wrong” is used to describe a claim that is unfalsifiable. (E.g., “god exists, but he never interacts with this universe.”). Here, the claim the CC owns the copyright to the image is falsifiable. I suggest “so wrong I don’t even know what to say” is more accurate.

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.
- James Kimbell
  
  You are technically correct (the best kind of correct), but
  
  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.
- elix
  
  I always thought of “not even wrong” as having a more colloquial meaning. Example:
  
  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.
Bryan3000000

I suppose the way to fix this would be a lawsuit for violation of the attribution requirement for a CC license. It seems like Creative Commons could consider the funding of such a lawsuit to be an act of public education about CC licenses – a victory requiring simple retraction and proper attribution could be used as an example to educate companies and copyright holders to the proper use of CC licenses – especially the proper attribution of copyright on work using CC licenses that require it.
euansmith

Because: Daily Mail.
Horace Wallerton

They aren’t known as “The Daily Fail” for nothing.
- jaduncan
  
  Actually the Daily Heil around here.
Andrew Perrine

I appreciated the wikipedia link, but I don’t get how it applies in this case. It’s wrong and wrong.
http://wwwhatsup.com Joly MacFie

here we see the New York Post crediting a framegrab of the Freedom-to-Connect video to ‘YouTube’ http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/brooklyn/reddit_co_founder_commits_suicide_AZPHGFSHzBRrOHbx2yGM9O
http://www.facebook.com/steven.rowlinson Steven Rowlinson

Clarification:

Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.