Received an email from old time pal and PR blogger, Stephen Davies, telling me about his firm, Webit PR’s, latest offering: Proveit.
Proveit is a service that provides copyright approval for clients using Webit PR’s online newswire to reproduce and use cuttings from 1000 online editors and bloggers.
As Stephen pitched it:
"Say if you’ve written a blog post about a company or product and the PR
team for said company creates a cutting from your blog post without your
permission. How would you feel about that? If you discovered they had
would you think it was copyright infringement?"
Now Stephen knows me well enough to know that personally if my blog gets cut I won’t be too bothered. However, if you are one of those hardcore commerical types or indeed a professional blogger you may well take umbrage at having your site used in this way.
My only thoughts are:
- if you are run an overtly commercial type of blog – or at least are commercial enough to worry about copyright issues – then are you perceived as less credible than the ‘someone like me’ character most trusted by the public?
- Plus, I presume that any bloggers using Creative Commons licences are happy for their content top be re-used?
I mean, kudos to the guys at Webit PR for continuing to bring online PR activity closer to the world in which traditional PR types understand, but if we reinforce the existing perception of the web as a logical extension of offline PR – one with the same rules – are we missing out on the chance to change the way PR practitioners think and behave?
More info on
their SMNR here.
Technorati tags: Webit PR, Proveit, copyright, creative commons
Hi Simon
Thanks for the link. I have been pondering your question about changing PR practioner’s behaviour and whether what we at webitpr are doing is counterproductive to this. At the risk of sounding defensive I don’t think this is the case.
Apart from the legal and commercial rationales for this project there were also two key reasons why we embarked on it that I think are very relevant to an understanding of online PR rather than an extension of offline.
Firstly respect for others. In an online world where respect is often not shown e.g Chris Anderson’s recent post, the exercise was/is aimed at all relevant online media from the “traditional” through to the “new” and though I take on board your point about Creative Commons many sites, blogs included, dont make such a statement. We didnt/dont want to assume that publications/people are OK with such usage as in our opinion to do so is the easy way, in the same way that sending cold pitches to people who dont know you is the easy way and doesnt show respect. It was interesting that a number of sites specifically commented on the fact that they were very pleasantly surprised to be asked.
Quote from a response from a top 2k technorati blog with 2m page views per month
“No problems with your request and thanks for asking – it doesn’t really seem fair that the good guys have to go to so much extra work to meet the letter of the law when there are so many who just flaunt the tenets of fair play. We regularly find whole articles, verbatim sections of articles and our images reproduced on other sites without so much as an acknowledgement or a link.”
Secondly we wanted to educate PR practioners that even though online activity is more dynamic and remote it still involves real people and when you are dealing with significant numbers of people (in our case over 1,000 sites to date that have responded) you can get some very different viewpoints e.g. 80% of sites that responded may have said yes to our request to reproduce the coverage but 20% said no. Thats a lot of people you could potentially upset.
In conclusion we are trying to get across to people in our own small way that just because the online world is large and based on technology it isnt an excuse to forget that respect for the individuals involved must be shown. However much hard work that means you need to put in.
Thanks again.
Adam
Wow Adam. That is the longest comment I have ever had on the blog 🙂
I totally see where you’re coming from. But as I talked to Stephen about, my mindset is very much about challenging existing ways of doing things…. I like to think copyright has very little relevance in a networked world.
For instance, I also totally agree with your argument that it’s a matter of respect, remembering there’s a person behind the blog etc but then copyright wasn’t set up to grant personal or peer-to-peer recognition for people’s work. It was created to grant legal ownership with a view to capitalising on something. That is what I think is now outdated.
So….. yes to respect and recognition (and more of them I say!) and no to copyright as a tool for levaging power and money. Er… I think 🙂
Simon its nice to set the record for something! Stephen will tell you that once I get on a roll there’s no stopping me. Apologies if I’ve taken a big chunk out of your webspace 🙂
Cheers
Adam
Not at all! Thanks for your thoughts… there don;t seem to be as many PR-focussed debates these days… always up for one!