Gawker points out that Matt Drudge isn’t making any friends by using other people’s photographs on his site. This time, Drudge seems to have taken a photo by Tom Tomorrow, altered it, and posted it for consumption.
So outside of using the bandwidth from other sites such as Yahoo!, The Smoking Gun, and others, Drudge is now actually taking other people’s photographs and altering on his site for his use, with no credit being given to the owner of the photo.
Am I missing something here? The average Joe (website owner, blogger) has been known to catch major flack for taking other people’s photos or using someone else’s bandwidth, but Drudge’s site does this on a massive scale, if his statistics are any indication - and no one is saying anything about it.
[update] As of Tuesday evening, August 3, no response has been returned from Yahoo! media relations, but I did hear back from the Associated Press, whose copyrights I would assume are being passed over when images are being used - let alone bandwidth from image hosts like Yahoo! and others. The AP’s official response from Director of Media Relations Jack Stokes was “We decline to comment at this time.”
[ed: Post updated for clarity on 3 Aug 2004. I was trying to state the case of constant misuse of photographs on the Drudge site, whether it was bandwidth-related or just the alteration of images.]
6 responses so far ↓
1 jenett.radio // Jul 29, 2004 at 6:57 pm
scattered tidbits [2]…
I feel I’ve learned a lot this week, but not nearly as much as Lane has.
Here’s yet another bit of
2 Croooow Blog // Aug 2, 2004 at 10:25 pm
More hypocrisy from “Tom Tomorrow”
Just like he did when Dems such as Ron Reagan, Jr. and Hodean psychoanalyzed Bush, “Tomorrow” is silent as the…
3 Brian Carnell // Aug 3, 2004 at 6:17 am
It might help if you undrestood the issue:
“Am I missing something here? The average Joe (website owner, blogger) has been known to catch major flack for using someone else’s bandwidth, but Drudge’s site does this on a massive scale, if his statistics are any indication - and no one is saying anything about it.”
Yes you are missing something. If he altered it, he clearly is not using Tom Tomorrow’s bandwidth.
Swiping the photo and alterting is unethical, but you come off as an idiot when you talk about stealing “bandwidth” since the altered picture would, by definition, have to be hosted locally by Drudge.
4 Tom // Aug 3, 2004 at 8:56 am
Actually, Brian - I do understand the issue. I obviously did a poor job writing this post up, which I’ll admit to, but I was actually trying to refer back to the fact that Drudge’s site continually has something unethical or screwed up going on. In this case, he took someone else’s work, gave no credit, and then altered it.
I was just referring to the fact that, if you had clicked through to the link at the bottom of the post, Drudge has been using images hosted elsewhere on a regular basis, and with no end in sight. I was saying that “Matt Drudge isn’t making any friends by using other people’s photographs on his site,” and this is the second method through which he is doing so. Sometimes they are hosted elsewhere, sometimes he’s obviously brought them local to his site.
My bad on not being clearer the first time, but the re-write of the middle of this post should clarify for everyone.
5 Dabitch // Aug 3, 2004 at 12:18 pm
Altering an image is still copyright infringement, so I get what you are saying (but you did clarify your writing.. Oh well, I’m late to the party as usual.). It is indeed strange.
6 Plato // Aug 17, 2004 at 5:06 pm
I just noticed something else about drudge — at the moment he says there have been some 9 million visits to his website today. My drudgereport page auto-refreshes every four minutes. does that mean that if I leave his site up on my browser, I’ll register as 15 visitors in an hour? I think, yes.