Hi, Westword writers! Since it has come to my attention that your paper seems to really like being a member of UER.CA, I though I'd point out that copying entries and photos from the (admittedly antiquated) Location DB is plagiarism. People who read your site may not know this, as they are not members here, but anyone here can see that no actual journalistic work was done for this story. You simply copied and pasted entries from the private DB onto your public blog.

Also, you stole photographs from a few personal friends of mine. Not cool. The photographs in the DB are considered to be the copyrighted intellectual property of the respective photographers. It is a closed system and is not considered to be public domain.

Seriously. Get off of UER, Westword writers, and go explore something. Then, write something original about that instead of stealing your content from here. Otherwise, I see some costly copyright violation lawsuits in your future.

Totally shitty lazy journalism!


Copy + Paste

they do it way to much.

If you actually want them to see it, make this thread publicly viewable. But for real, I saw this earlier and sighed deeply. Laziest journalism ever.

For shame.

Posted by -insertnamehere- If you actually want them to see it, make this thread publicly viewable.

Mods, can we make this so?

Although it wouldn't surprise me to learn that at least one Westword writer has full membership. Lots of new faces here in the Four Corners forum.

At least they only did demolished sites. Still, write Michael Roberts a nastygram.

At least they only did demolished sites. Still, write Michael Roberts a nastygram.

At least they didn't use any of my photos haha.

Made this thread Public!

The unethical journalistic practices of the Westward has been pissing me off for a long time too.

Aside from stealing original content and claiming it as your own I've discovered locations tend to be more inaccessible after you rip content. At least try to edit original content to preserve the integrity of these places, it will also be beneficial to you so you have more content to steal.

after westword wrote that article about the old university hospital, that place got wreaked

I've written a few nasty-grams to this guy, and am quite tempted to (in the spirit of copying and pasting things) copy and paste our conversation here for your guys' entertainment...

In other words, please copy and paste this thread into your next journalistic masterpiece. I know this thread is lacking photographs, so shortly I'll be sure to upload photos of my butt to keep up standards.

Bit of a bump, but I haven't been on UER (or looked at the Westword) since I moved out of Colorado almost two years ago. After reading this thread I did a cursory Google and noticed that they used my pictures (and some of the text used verbatim) for an entire article without providing credit.

http://blogs.westw...nse_megacenter.php

Thanks for posting this thread because I wouldn't have found out otherwise. I'm not a professional photographer and I'm not particularly attached to the pictures I create, but it sucks to see them reused without any credit

Posted by RabidMonkey After reading this thread I did a cursory Google and noticed that they used my pictures (and some of the text used verbatim) for an entire article without providing credit.

Ah sorry to hear that man! Take 'em to court! Ok maybe not, but man that really does suck. Not sure if anyone has tried this yet, but try emailing them and asking them to at least give credit.

I wrote them a letter to resolve the issue in a friendly manner and it's all sorted (with the post outright removed). Although I hope in future that they either reach out to photographers if they want to use their work in Westword blogs/articles, or at least expend the extra effort to find content that can be freely used without any doubt or ambiguity (either photos in the public domain or usable under a CC license, etc...)

In my experience with using other people's content off of the internet I've always gone with the assumption that if a piece of work isn't explicitly released under a free or copyleft license (or some derivative of these which allows for re-use), then it's probably copyrighted in some way. This is what I was taught years ago, and it's always been reinforced in my professional experiences. But I've only worked with images in the context of film/CG and video games, so maybe this assumption isn't as common in journalism (although, to be honest, it would really surprise me were this the case). The thought crossed my mind that perhaps the author might think that using images in this way might be considered a 'fair use' case, but that seems like a bit of a stretch, especially considering the photos are essentially the whole of the blog posts in question. Oddly enough, in most of their other articles/posts (which contain (presumably) original writing/articles), the images are typically credited, even though using them in this way makes a stronger case for treating the content as a fair use case (but this is just IMO at this point, I'm not a lawyer or anything).