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You are currently browsing comments. If you would like to return to the full story, you can read the full entry here: “The Sun: how not to win friends or influence bloggers”.
5 Pings to “The Sun: how not to win friends or influence bloggers”
10 Responses to “The Sun: how not to win friends or influence bloggers”
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1. Fredorrarci Says:
June 15th, 2010 at 11:39 pmThere is another point to be made — minor, perhaps, but noteworthy: the email from the PR company describes this as “a bit of friendly competition between the 32 best football blogs in the UK”. Scanning through the blogs they’ve co-opted onto this, at least five (including my own) are not based in the UK. This isn’t necessarily going to cause a problem — I know that two of those blogs have plugged the sweepstake — but if the people behind this aren’t even going to be arsed to get something simple like that right (by, oh, let’s say, looking at the About page), I’m not going to be arsed to help them out. (Quite apart from my reservations about helping out that paper in the first place, of course.)
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2. Siany Says:
June 16th, 2010 at 12:39 amI could be wrong about this, but I don’t think there’s an issue with using a company logo. I’m pretty sure that’s legal – you use it to be promoted and as it’s part of your commercial branding, it’s public domain. Like I say, I could have that entirely wrong. Implying that the bloggers endorsed the app and backing this up with their logos is one thing (and a pretty shite thing at that), but they’re not actually stealing content.
I think what they’ve done is deplorable, but I’d be curious about the legal aspects of logo use in this case – Gary, do you have a more solid answer about that?
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3. Gary Says:
June 16th, 2010 at 8:31 amThat’s a really good question Sian, and I don’t actually know the answer. My knowledge of copyright – other than who owns any copy I write – is a little hazy. There’s a good possibility you could well be right (or not. I’m not sure about the public domain bit for company logos…)
I think this situation may be complicated by the large number of blogs and a mish-mash of how they’ve designed their site. Some will have designed the logo themselves, some will have got a friend to do so, some will have paid a graphic designer or web designer to put it together, some won’t even have a proper logo.
In addition, some will be commercial enterprises, some sit on a wider blogging network (Arseblog is part of Ole Ole), some will may a small amount of money from Google adwords and some don’t make any cash at all.
My gut instinct, after reading your comments, would be there may be a few of them that it’s not legal for The Sun to use, but most others are within the law. But I don’t know. I suspect it’s a bit of a grey area.
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4. Jon Says:
June 16th, 2010 at 9:15 amAs someone who has both worked for a tabloid and written a blog, I really think that this is a bit insane. Surely by publishing a blog on the internet, you’re inviting people to read it? No matter where they come from. I mean, I disagree with Google’s policy on China but I’d not refuse to let them link to my site.
Obviously The Sun hacks who put this together have been terrifically lazy – but you can point that out on your blog and feel content that you’ve scored a blow against Murdoch’s minions. I certainly don’t think that they’ve behaved deplorably. It certainly doesn’t live up to, you know, their lies about immigrants or anything like that.
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5. Siany Says:
June 16th, 2010 at 9:26 amI did some digging, and er, found The Sun’s guidelines on THEIR logos, because that’s FUN
http://www.sun.com/policies/trademarks/
And for those of you too lazy for clicking: “Third parties may not use any Sun logo for any purpose without a license to do so.”
I’m pretty sure that it’s ‘accepted’ to use a public logo as long as you’re not writing something negative about someone, but if the Sun don’t like it, then they should really stick by their own rules.
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6. Gary Says:
June 16th, 2010 at 9:44 amJon, I think from a lot of bloggers perspectives, it’s more the association with The Sun that they object to (and I’ve seen there’s one Liverpool blog on there. I wonder if they said yes). That might be because of Hillsborough, or it might be because they just don’t want their blog to be associated with The Sun (or implied to be endorsing it). A lot of the blogs have worked very hard to present themselves as very independent from the likes of The Sun. It evokes quite strong reactions.
(Also, I’m not really trying to point score against Murdoch here, other than a reference to his comment about Google, which is just something I disagree with in general. I’m under no illusions that any more than about half a dozen people read this blog and whatever I write on here will make a blind bit of difference. I just don’t think what they did was right – and as I’m involved in the footballing blogging community, I blogged about it. I’d have done the same had it been another tabloid or broadsheet).
I guess it’s also the general principle of it as well – it’s kind of bad manners to ask “Do you want to get involved in this?” and then do it anyway regardless. As I said in the post, there’s better ways of doing this.
I don’t want to speak on behalf of the other bloggers involved – I’m sure some don’t mind the extra traffic and some would rather stick to their principles.
That said, a lot of football bloggers are generally quite accommodating, to a point, of the mainstream media. But they also have the right to say no to them. It was also a good opportunity for The Sun to build some links and enhance its reputation in the football blogging community and it would have been nice to see them at least try.
In the whole grand scheme of things, you’re right. This really isn’t a particularly big issue and I doubt The Sun or their readers, or even some of the blogs’ own readers will care. But it still doesn’t mean that they were lazy and wrong.
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7. Thomas Says:
June 16th, 2010 at 9:47 amThere are two issues regarding copyright. First is ownership. The Sun can claim fair usage in regards to using a copyright logo. Reproducing any of the blog content, however, could be seen as going beyond fair usage.
The second are moral rights. These are a little less cut and dried, but the upshot is, if The Sun have asked permission for the involvement of an organisation in a project, and they have declined; or the organisation has not been contacted, they could be in breach of the blogs moral rights
These means: “to object to derogatory treatment of the work or film which amounts to a distortion or mutilation or is otherwise prejudicial to the honour or reputation of the author or director.”
The blog that didn’t respond may have inadvertently agreed. An active NO is a stronger position to argue from than I didn’t reply and assumed that meant no.
Either way, the paper has shown a disregard for the blogs involved and they aren’t behaving in a manner I would expect from a journalist.
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8. James T Says:
June 16th, 2010 at 2:12 pmYeah, we’re not in the UK either. Yet apparently gave score predictions for some early games.
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9. Graham Says:
June 16th, 2010 at 2:27 pmThe UK doesn’t have “fair use”, it has a different thing called “fair dealing”, which is a much narrower set of allowed uses (journalism/criticism/academia/etc), which I don’t think this falls under. So potentially there’s a copyright claim.
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10. Chris Says:
June 19th, 2010 at 1:12 amTo add some more detail to all this, when The Sun approached us to tell us about the game, they didn’t ask us permission to use our logo on their website. In all honesty, I don’t mind, simply because they are using it alongside our name. If someone takes our logo, removes our website name to put his own and starts using it on his blog, that would be different, but for this particular issue, seriously, I don’t mind.
I always like to give the benefit of the doubt when required and I want to believe The Sun did it in good faith, just like us when we used Arsenal’s logo in our header which we had to remove when DataCo asked us to do it on behalf of the club.
From what I understand The Sun immediately removed the logos of the unhappy bloggers and besides I received an e-mail two days ago asking me whether I would still want to be part of the game.
Chris,
The Gunning Hawk
June 15th, 2010 at 11:37 pm
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Josh R, garyandrews and Jamie Potter, Fredorrarci. Fredorrarci said: RT @garyandrews: Thanks to everybody who RTed @pitchinvasion's post on The Sun. Have blogged about it myself as well http://bit.ly/99VPiz [...]
June 16th, 2010 at 10:41 am
[...] So for tabloid readers in Scotland it’s still wide-open for someone to nip in and still The Sun’s glory (though The Sun is doing really well at cheesing off the blogger community according to this piece). [...]
June 16th, 2010 at 11:05 pm
[...] The Sun: how not to win friends or influence bloggers » Gary Andrews It does a disservice: to the bloggers involved who said no to the original request, to the readers who will assume that these blogs endorse The Sun, and to any hardworking PR who has spent ages building relations with these blogs for a very tiny mention, especially PRs from other papers. [...]
June 19th, 2010 at 1:02 pm
[...] The Sun: how not to win friends or influence bloggers Kevin: Gary Andrews looks at how The Sun in the UK played an own goal in its attempts to engage bloggers to flesh out its coverage. After contacting bloggers and asking whether they would like to participate in their coverage, The Sun went ahead whether the bloggers gave permission or not. Chris Taylor from "It'll Be Off wrote to Gary: "I want to make it abundantly clear to everyone: I have nothing to do with this. I want nothing to do with this. And I am furious that the good(ish) name of my little blog, that ceased to be a concern some six months ago, is being used by the worst of all tabloids as some fucking publicity machine for their horrendous sweepstake generating iPhone app, and their even more horrendous newspaper.” Rights seem only to apply to media companies not to content creators. (tags: blogs socialmedia fuckwittery copyright WorldCup) [...]
January 31st, 2011 at 7:02 pm
[...] The Sun: how not to win friends or influence bloggers [...]