Comments on: Drudge Steals

Drudge Steals

crunchland — Sat, 31 Jul 2004 07:26:54 -0800

and manipulates it for whatever reasons make sense to Matt Drudge.

By: crunchland

crunchland — Sat, 31 Jul 2004 07:30:54 -0800

I say allegedly because the photo is missing from the original page on the Drudge site. Tom should have taken a screen shot of the photo on Matt's site. (Hey, lookie! I just realized, I'm on a first name basis with two people I don't even know!)

By: jonson

jonson — Sat, 31 Jul 2004 07:37:52 -0800

The permalink is about two full screens above the Drudge story, once you click through scroll down quite a ways until you get to the photo of Bill O'Reilly & Michael Moore. I gotta say though, this seems pretty trivial, especially w/out the screenshot.

By: jonson

jonson — Sat, 31 Jul 2004 07:39:43 -0800

Actually, ignore my comment about the scrolling, link seems fine.

By: crunchland

crunchland — Sat, 31 Jul 2004 07:41:37 -0800

Actually, Tom Tomorrow apparently doesn't include the dimensions of his photos in his html, so the browser does sort of jump around once the photos are loaded. I actually linked to the permalink of the entry just above the Drudge story. It will seem fine when you go back, because you have the photos in your cache.

By: FormlessOne

FormlessOne — Sat, 31 Jul 2004 07:44:24 -0800

If it's trivial, then why the theft?

By: kablam

kablam — Sat, 31 Jul 2004 08:02:05 -0800

Obviously this is done to distract America from John Kerry's big speech.

By: crunchland

crunchland — Sat, 31 Jul 2004 08:04:09 -0800

Presumably, we have a bunch of witnesses who all saw the photograph when the page it was linked here a few days ago.

By: mecran01

mecran01 — Sat, 31 Jul 2004 08:04:41 -0800

I would like to see both of them in a celebrity boxing match.

By: crunchland

crunchland — Sat, 31 Jul 2004 08:08:14 -0800

...and um, Arielmeadow linked the photo issue in the thread when it was posted a few days ago, too. That's what I get for avoiding political threads on metafilter.

By: dhoyt

dhoyt — Sat, 31 Jul 2004 08:22:10 -0800

Tom vs. Matt, Bill vs. Michael, Rush vs. Al... Wankers, all.

By: matteo

matteo — Sat, 31 Jul 2004 08:37:21 -0800

I'm surprised by this lapse of journalistic integrity, it's unusual on Drudge's part

By: skallas

skallas — Sat, 31 Jul 2004 08:39:02 -0800

Drudge did it for the safety of his viewers. After sucking of the drudge teat for so long even a glance at Tom Tomorrow's blog would put them straight into cardiac arrest. That Drudge, always looking out for his readers.

By: smackfu

smackfu — Sat, 31 Jul 2004 08:41:52 -0800

But I thought Drudge stole photos all the time? It's not like he has any rights to the wire service photos he puts up on his front page.

By: xammerboy

xammerboy — Sat, 31 Jul 2004 08:43:08 -0800

Are you sure this is illegal? I don't see any rights reserved on the website. Also, flipping the picture and making the light green instead of red, might have been done just avoid having users eyes automatically drift to the red light. It doesn't seem like a viable way of "changing" the picture to the extent someone else wouldn't recognize it.

By: destro

destro — Sat, 31 Jul 2004 09:29:48 -0800

flipping the picture and making the light green instead of red, might have been done just avoid having users eyes automatically drift to the red light. This isn't art photography. If anything, you should leave background elements as they were if you want to be considered a reliable journalist. It may not be illegal for him to do this, but Drudge probably didn't want to take the chance. What a sleazebag.

By: skynxnex

skynxnex — Sat, 31 Jul 2004 09:42:37 -0800

xammerboy: (of course, IANAL) in modern copyright law, you have "all rights reserved" on all works you create even if you don't have an explicit statement saying so. You can reduce the amount you're "reserving", but nothing a copyright statement says can ever increase the amount of protection you have by default (under copyright law).

By: Vidiot

Vidiot — Sat, 31 Jul 2004 10:13:57 -0800

Regardless of whether or not it's legal, it's certainly unethical. But this is Drudge we're talking about, so...

By: srboisvert

srboisvert — Sat, 31 Jul 2004 12:10:07 -0800

The changing of light color is clearly an al-qaida steganographic message. Osama has worked out a deal with Drudge where Drudge gets the word out to the cells and in exchange he gets an exclusive interview with Osama's hair stylist.

By: reklaw

reklaw — Sat, 31 Jul 2004 12:45:47 -0800

Someone put someone else's photo up on their page? On the Internet!? Oh noes!!!11

By: freebird

freebird — Sat, 31 Jul 2004 15:50:50 -0800

Duh, it's clearly been switched to make it easier to track who's who: O'Reilly is on the RIGHT, and Moore is on the LEFT...

By: stavrosthewonderchicken

stavrosthewonderchicken — Sat, 31 Jul 2004 17:33:48 -0800

What a big sad doofus. Good things webloggers are journalists, huh? [/troll]

By: tsarfan

tsarfan — Sat, 31 Jul 2004 17:43:56 -0800

has drudge done anything ever? he doesnt write. he was leaked the story about monica. during this, the peak of conservatives dominating radio and tv talk shows, he cant find a way to get his radio show out of the sunday evening graveyard. can you really be considered a has-been if you were a never-was?

By: geekhorde

geekhorde — Sun, 01 Aug 2004 00:51:25 -0800

tsarfan: HAHAHAHA! Thats hella funny man.

By: Outlawyr

Outlawyr — Sun, 01 Aug 2004 05:04:14 -0800

It was a violation of copyright law both to post the picture and to make the changes to it (thus creating an unauthorized derivative work). However, the greater crime is that Tom T doesn't add dimensions to his IMG tags. He must be stopped!

By: robcorr

robcorr — Sun, 01 Aug 2004 22:34:54 -0800

Tom Tomorrow says he has a screen-cap. He'll presumably post it soon. If Drudge had nicked the photo and not changed it, I probably wouldn't care. But the fact that he went to these lengths to hide his crime is pathetic.

By: dabitch

dabitch — Mon, 02 Aug 2004 07:04:41 -0800

Wow, that's pretty blatant. What I don't understand is that - if Drudge doesn't have deals with the wire services - why don't the big guns like AP and Reuters go after him for his obvious infringement?

By: djspicerack

djspicerack — Mon, 02 Aug 2004 12:34:20 -0800

I've written about this twice and asked Drudge about it (of course, with no email response.) I'm not sure why no one calls him out publicly about it. He's stealing bandwidth from Yahoo!, MyWay, Boston.com, et al on a regular basis. Let alone the fact that he's posting images he doesn't have deals to show his readers. I actually called The Smoking Gun about it once and the person there basically said "Yeah, we know he's doing it, but we aren't going to say anything about it." It's actually even worse when he uses the wire service images, because he doesn't even host 99% of them on his site. He lets those companies host the bandwidth to serve up "8 million" pageviews per day. Isn't this like...stealing? People have gotten their hosting accounts suspended for less than what Drudge is doing.