The Daily Cal Strikes Back
The Daily Cal has decided to grow a pair and try to protect its perennially mediocre product by making stopping CalStuff from linking to its photos. From an email sent to me this weekend:
Hi Ben,
Hope all is well with you!
I noticed a Daily Cal photo in your recent Calstuff post “Why Can’t We Nominate Someone Who Likes Us?”. Because we own legal copyrights on all of our photos, please speak to our photo editor Salgu Wissmath about obtaining a photo reprint authorization and crediting the Daily Cal when posting a photo or remove the photo from the post. You can reach Salgu at wissmath@berkeley.edu or at 510-548-8300 ext. 427.
Thanks!
Tiffany—
Editor in Chief & President
The Daily Californian
OK, if that’s how is going to be, then so be it. We’ll forget the five years of cooperation, sharing stories and facts, and good will. We certainly never asked you to cite us for the number of stories we leaked on this blog that were never even on your radar. Enjoy your power trip against a blog which makes zero money. A lawsuit against us for violating copyrights could easily take infinite percent of our profits. And, for the record, the number of Daily Cal photos that we’ve ever used is minimal at best. Next time the Daily Cal tries to take the side of the whining city residents on behalf of smaller local businesses, I hope someone out there hears the word “hypocrisy”.
As a Daily Cal veteran and someone who, in professional life, has obtained and paid for their photographers’ work, I suggest a cooling down.
First of all, the reprint authorizations were created in a pre-internet age and it’s not certain that Calstuff, a non-moneymaker, is bound by those rules. It’s not clear that you’re “reprinting” for that matter.
Secondly, rather than taking your ball and going home, you could, perhaps, work out a deal in which you simply have to credit the photographer (photo courtesy Mike Simon/The Daily Californian) or something of that nature. It’s doubtful money would even be asked for, and, frankly, the Daily Cal isn’t hurt by organizations linking to its Web page and drumming up interest in campus news.
That might be for the best. There’s certainly nothing to keep them from reading your web log and cherry-picking, so you might as well get something if you can. The institutional memories of student publications don’t usually extend more than three or four years, so all of the informal cooperation you’ve had in the past probably doesn’t mean a thing.
Comment by L. L. Taraval — January 31, 2007 @ 10:21 am