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

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.

(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.

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.