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So, in the past, I've yelled at Rixstep for stealing other people's content, and using it for their own purposes. Sure, they noted where they got it from. That's right up there with "Hey, I stole Bob's car, but I'm noting it's Bob's car I stole."

You still stole it.

Just to head this off, yes, I do think copying content without prior permission, either explicitly and specifically from the creator, or in a license, is stealing. Period. Not excerpting, or quoting. In quoting and excerpting, even though you use someone else's content, you are being clear that it's not yours, and you should, barring the source being a douchewad whom you don't want getting traffic from your site, properly link back to said source. Is that perhaps sophistry? Maybe. But, at least with quoting, you aren't attempting to take credit for someone else's work, nor are you attempting to make it sound like the other person speaks for you. You are using their words, and (hopefully) some vague analysis to make your own point. Ideally, you have an equal, or greater amount of your own content in there.

But taking unedited content, and pass it off as your own? Or even kind of passing it off as your own? Yeah. Stealing. Plagiarism at the very least, but still, stealing. Even worse, removing "bad" words. Now you can't even steal it right.

Enter Sam Downie. Sam is trying to become an Internet 2.0 star. You know the type. The ideological child of Scoble. Basically, he's a New Media Douchebag. Lives for Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etc. Him and that other New Media Douchebag poster child, Adam Jackson, did a 24x7 livecast of Macworld Expo.

Sidenote the first: I always wonder, do they turn it off when they take a shit? Because if so, then it's not truly 24x7. What if they get lucky...er, when they're spanking it, wishing they were getting laid? Not that anyone should see that, but, if you're going to claim 24x7, then you better step up and do it all.

Look at Sam's site. New Media Douchebag, all the way.

Sidenote the second: He's charging 50 fucking pounds sterling an hour to help set up a firewall!?! I hope there aren't that many suckers in GB, but if there are, I'm emigrating!

Sam has some form of Internet Radio Show. Yay for Sam. We all need something. Sam, like many radio show hosts wants guests, but alas, Sam's a New Media Douchebag. He doesn't want to do the work. Ah, the intarweb to the rescue! He makes with the typing, and goes to Shawn King's site, and listens to Shawn's Internet radio show, Your Mac Life. Now Shawn is not a New Media Douchebag. He can be a douchebag about many other things, but he really is not a New Media Douchebag. It's one of his good qualities. (That, and I can run faster than him :-P)

Shawn, not being a New Media Douchebag, does a lot of work to get his guests. He spends a lot of time getting them on the show, and making sure that their segment is interesting for the listeners. He's really good at it. When it comes to da radio, Shawn is in fact, quite amazingly good.

A few weeks ago, on February 13th, Shawn had Tim Gibbons on. Tim is a producer and director, who unlike many who claim those titles, actually works in those fields. It was a good interview, but Shawn's good at that.

Alas, Sam, as are many New Media Douchebags, was looking for content, without all that pesky "work". Spin Magic Wheel of Entitlement Douchery, Spin! Find me my content so that I don't have to work!

click...click...Yay! Your Mac Life! So Sam does his New Media Douchebag thing, and Tim Gibbons gets a tweet from Sam:

@Tim_Gibbons hope u r listening to my radio show as U are about to be on it :) tune-in at: www.dsoundz.co.uk and click Listen NOW :)

Shawn starts getting Twitter queries from Tim. Tim is very confused, for Tim does not remember being on Sam's show, and he's probably fairly certain that he's not on the show as he's reading that tweet. I imagine Tim had a moment of "HOLY FUCK, LSD REALLY DOESN'T EVER GO AWAY!". If Tim never did LSD, (not saying he did or did not, it's a comedy moment, chill), then I imagine it would be even more disturbing to have your reality fucked with.

So Tim replies back:

@samdownie Wait, I was on your show? I think I missed that! :)"

Since Shawn follows Tim on Twitter, he sees Tim's tweet, and from there, Sam's. Hmm.

Tim tells Shawn that he had never been on Sam's show, and asked Shawn if he'd given Sam permission to rebroadcast the interview. Shawn had not. So Shawn goes to Sam's site and sees:

I went to Sam's web site and, sure enough, he had a message on his site, "You are listening to Shawn King talking to Tim Gibbons on my radio show NOW!"

Da Fuck? No, actually, it was Shawn talking to Tim on Shawn's show, as stolen and rebroadcast sans permission by Sam. As Shawn wrote:

You can listen to the audio of the show and, sure enough, with about 36 mins left, he starts pimping the interview with Tim Gibbons. Now, to be fair, Sam doesn't pass it off as his own interview or say I'm a "correspondent" or anything like that. He does mention Your Mac Life and our URL but he does *not* make it clear that he's simply taking our content and rebroadcasting it.

The wheels on the New Media Douchebag bus go 'round and 'round...

What kind of fucking crackhead thinks this is fair use? I've been over that section of U.S. Copyright law too many times for my own good, Sam in no way meets that, and I'll take a WAG, and guess he's not doing legal Fair Use under the UK version either. Attribution, even proper, is not permission.

Shawn is not doing this because he's a great guy, he's doing it because that's his job. He has other people, among them Audible.com, who pay him money to rebroadcast his stuff, and oddly, they get pissy when other people do it for free. Go figure. Shawn's pissed, and he has a right to. This is his work, his time, his efforts, and Sam, like the New Media Douchebag he is, just fucking slices it out of his show without so much as a by-your-leave? Even worse, he fucking censors it, so that no one has to hear teh bad werds. He's not only a New Media Douchebag, he's too much of a wuss to not fuck with the content he steals. Jerk.

What a fucking cockmonger. I mean holy fuck, is it that hard to ask? He's on Twitter, I assume he can work email, Shawn is a real easy guy to get ahold of. Even if he didn't let him just rebroadcast that interview, I'm pretty sure he'd have worked with Sam to help out somehow, within his particular constraints.

But no, "it's on da intarwebs, it's free!". Bullshit. Bull-fucking-shit, it ain't free for you to copy without asking. Take me for example. The stuff on this site? I'm mellow about it. It's annoying when it gets republished without credit, but face it, anyone who's read me will know what's up. I have a...unique voice. However, when I sell articles, then I do get pissed. Someone else paid for that work, that effort, and I fucking did the work and the effort. (If you think it's easy, YOU do a detailed look at SNMP on Mac OS X 10.5, see how fucking easy it is.)I, the asshole doing the work chose to sell that work and certain rights to it for an amount of filthy lucre that I find agreeable. No, you do not have the fucking right to republish it without fucking asking.

You don't have the right to do it with this stuff either. (Especially since y'all are some cheap fuckers...my google ads ain't even payin' my bandwidth bills. Just a click people, don't be that way.) Not without asking.

In short, Sam Downie is a New Media Douchebag, and needs a good scrotal tasin'. Dickhead.

<OMG!!111 TEH AWSUM UPDATZ! Sam is now quoting Digg's fucking TOS at me! (at Shawn too) Because, as we all know, there's no better way to prove you're not a fucking douchecrumpet, (See? See that? Douchcrumpet! 'Cause Sam's British, so they eat crumpets! That's why I'm cool, I use region-correct invective!), than to quote DIGG'S TOS at me. Because O NOES! I MIGHT GET BANNED FROM DIGG!!!! TEH WHOREOARS! TEH WHOREOARS! Sam? Here's a tip: That shit only works on other New Media Douchebag's. I don't give a fuck about Digg liking me or not. Maybe you should go for, you know, a response that is actually...effective next time.>

Technorati Tags:
Work has value, Your Mac Life, New Media Douchebags, Sam Downie: New Media Douchebag

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I always heart it when I see a tweet from you that I can't quite place and then 30 minutes there is a fully fledged 1400 word (!) bynkii article that would take me hours to produce. Anger writing FTW.

Given Downie's URL and his use of "U" and "R" as words, I figured he would be about 12 years old. I visit his site and I have to conclude that I'm right, in a sad way. 7, count 'em, SEVEN pics of his face/head on the front page smiling like a baby in his new playground. Not even *I*'m so self-obsessed. Thanks for the post.

Posted by: The Logic Dreamer | February 22, 2008 5:02 PM

The longer this lasts, the more it reeks of that Casa… cata… that MacHeist dude. Awesome. Always cool to see how people will respond not by rhetoric, but with vague threats and implied repercussions if the other party doesn't play nice.
Of course, rhetoric is most likely not his strong suit.

Posted by: The Logic Dreamer | February 22, 2008 10:39 PM

Oh, MacHeist is generating its own drama.

Posted by: John C. Welch | February 23, 2008 9:42 AM

"Shawn is a real easy guy to get ahold of."

Right up until the moment you call him to collect a debt, then the guy becomes as slippery as a fish and as unreachable as Jimmy Hoffa.

It has been a year and two days since he said this:

At 8:02 PM -0500 2/20/07, Shawn King wrote:
"I have *never* stiffed a business partner for money. I have *never* left an ISP holding a bag of debt. I have *never* moved servers trying to run way from an ISP."

I know Mr. King will bitch and moan about me airing dirty laundry, call me classless, demand that you take this down etc... BUT so long as we're exposing douchebags here: It has been a year since Shawn King stiffed this business partner, left this ISP holding a $9790.23 bag of debt, and moved servers while running away from this ISP, this business partner, and that debt.

Mr. King loves to sit and cast stones about the hypocrisy of others, oddly while living in a glass house. John you are smart, so why allow yourself to become a stone by proxy? Let Shawn fight his own battles. Let Shawn pay is own debts.

--chuck

Posted by: chuckgoolsbee | February 23, 2008 10:03 AM

Chuck, this is actually a bigger issue for me personally. I find, on a regular basis, entire articles of mine copied verbatim, with no attribution. Both the ones I write for free here, and the ones I am paid to write for others.

Both are wrong. Both are the same thought process that Downie used when he stole Shawn's interview.

I watch, and listen to my wife spending far too much time dealing with the rampant stealing of her very hard work. (far harder than mine. I can bang out 9K words in a few hours. Her stuff is multiple 18+-hour days of work. She puts real labor into it.)

What's the common response? "If you don't want people taking it, don't put it on the internet".

That's bullshit, and it's bullshit that affects me, Melissa, and a ton of other people directly. Sam is one of the few cases where you can actually nail down such an action to a specific person who isn't hiding behind some myspace nickname. It makes it hard to assign value to your work when people are stealing it and giving it away to everyone else *for free* and in too many cases, trying to assign THEIR copyright to YOUR work.

What Sam did was wrong. The fact that he did it to Shawn doesn't make it less wrong. Shawn's actions with regard to d.f. are also wrong, but the two are not connected. Sam's actions are wrong regardless of target. The fact that in this case, there's perhaps a bit of karmic retribution towards someone you're involved in an ugly money fight with does not make them less wrong.

besides, no one who's known me for more than 5 minutes is going to be dumb enough to dictate how I do things on this site.

Posted by: John C. Welch | February 23, 2008 12:01 PM

Chuck, that was my first thought as I was reading this too. I think what Sam did what absolute douchecrumpetry (I like that...) but I'm not going to be too heartbroken about who it happened to.

I miss the YML list and BSing with the two of you, among others, but it just left a bad taste in my mouth and I have not checked out the show since. I'd fell bettEr about the whole thing if Shawn would own up to it, but I doubt I'll ever even hear about it if he does. A shame...

Posted by: MikeM | February 23, 2008 12:35 PM

I'm not dictating how you do things on your site John, just expressing a similarly frustrated opinion.

Theft of content is really no different than theft of service.

People worked very hard to make YML work while it was hosted at d.f. Guys like Damian, Nik, Kyle and others. This is a very labor and capital intensive business with VERY high operating costs. Profit margins are measured in single-figure percentages. Unlike content, which can be duplicated with ease, this theft represents significant effort, equipment, and infrastructure all being focussed upon delivering a singular service, a unique moment in time. It isn't the theft of a duplicate, it was the theft of an original.

YML failed to pay over and over again. Late, short, and late again. We made endless good-faith efforts to resolve the issue. Including a very generous payment plan. Shawn King promised repeatedly that "as soon as the sponsorship money comes in, d.f will be paid"... Well, as soon as the sponsorship money came in he bolted. Leaving us in the lurch.

So just like the situations you describe, somebody did not get properly compensated for their work. While it may not be NEW MEDIA douchebaggery, it remains douchebaggery nonetheless.

Posted by: chuckgoolsbee | February 24, 2008 8:50 AM

Not disagreeing with you that what YML did sucked, not in the least. I'm saying that even though Shawn is a commonality in both incidents, Sam Downie's actions have nothing to do with that other than Shawn.

Posted by: bynkii | February 24, 2008 9:36 AM

Wow. Sorry to belabor a sidebar, but I had no idea that the YML/DF schism was still an ongoing issue that hadn't been settled properly.

Suddenly, I don't feel so bad for not having subscribed to YML yet.

Posted by: Moeskido | February 24, 2008 8:00 PM

It isn't a schism, just what is called in business a "Bad Debt."

Should YML ever cough up the money, the issue will go away.

Posted by: chuckgoolsbee | February 26, 2008 10:01 AM

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