When Media Conglomerates Steal

Front page of WIRED News

Yesterday I had a story published on WIRED News about a group of calligraphers in Chennai who are writing the last handwritten newspaper in the world. This morning I wanted to see how people were reacting to the story and checked Google to see how many people had linked to it. The story seemed to be well received. However, that was not all that I found. It turned out that so many people liked it that ABC News decided to publish the story for themselves and throw their copywrite logo underneath it to say they owned it. They retitled it, edited it lightly and threw a photo from Reuters on top of it. They even used my byline to make it look like they commissioned the piece.

The story on ABC's website

Now for those of you not steeped in media politics, freelance writers like myself make our living by selling stories to media outlets and we get paid in return for our work. We are usually allowed to resell a story after a certain amount of time to make a little more money for our labor. Still, most freelance writers barely scrape together a living, but do it out of love for the job. So when I found out that one of the largest media conglomerates in the world had decided to publish my writing without seeking my permission first (or offering to buy it) I sent a note out to them to see what was going on.

This is just one of many ways that big media companies try to take advantage of the people who actually produce the content that they depend on. ABC doesn't have a correspondent in Chennai, it wouldn't be practical for them to afford one, so when a story comes up that they want to print, it would seem fair that they would at least have the decency to support the people who write.

No response from them yet. More to come.

UPDATE: Following a reader's comment I've added a Digg button below if you want to spread the word about what ABC is up to.