The Punch, borrowed content and paying for half assed blogging

(Above: in classic The Punch blog style, a borrowed illustration to illustrate a borrowed point).

Just when this site thought it was the right time to start demanding payment for content - readers of this item are instructed to leave a brown paper bag full of two cent coins on the steps of Sydney GPO at the stroke of noon - the news continues to be ambivalent in the land of hostile News Corp readers.

And then I got to thinking about the concept of parasites, and started to wonder just how The Punch, Australia's most maudlin conversation, measures up.

Seeing as how The Punch rests on the seventh day - tired from having constructed its Murdochian wonders over the previous six days - I took Saturday's stories as a starting point.

Still at the head of the column was that loser Luke McIlveen's story about kids playing football When you're a kid, sometimes losing is winning. I'm sure he doesn't mind being called a loser, because he thinks all kids who lose should be clearly labelled losers, because it will make them better losers in later adult life.

His story was illustrated with a photo of kids playing football with the tag "Auskick", no doubt put out by the popular AFL/NAB program for young footballers. While the photo might have been on file for News Corp, it's generic and there are hundreds of Auskick photos going around on the full to overflowing intertubes. In terms of originality of illustration, score zilch.

We'll concede the next hole - which uses a snap of Alexander Downer to illustrate a story about golf being the secret vice of politicians and which might well be from the News Corp cupboard (or some freelancer or other bureau, who knows).

But next up is a picture of Mogadishu's town beach, "a long way from St. Kilda", to illustrate David Penberthy's story about the decent Islamic leader whom we ignored at our peril. And when I did a google search of its name - beaches Mogadishu - it turns up the exact same photo on another site along way from The Punch's humble site. Want to bet which site first put the image on the intertubes? We'd have to suspect a little borrowing, a little purloining, went on here, as whoever went searching for an image to illustrate the story dragged across the first thing that popped up.

The next image is a generic mother baby shot of hand on hand, which could have come from anywhere and probably did. Sure it's safe to use, but in terms of the dynamic innovative visual illustrations Rupert's supposed to be offering up as distinctive content, it's a total bummer.

The caption?

This cheesy generic photo doesn't really have much to do with Sophie's excellent piece about childcare.

I should pay for this?

Phew. By now we're down to the open thread for the day, illustrated with a clip from YouTube, which turns out to be a set of images put to music by one "regnillip", and tells the story of the great British Train Robbery with cards and photographs. Let's not worry about the clearances of the photos or the music on the original, let's just note this down as rampant borrowing of material from another non-News Corp source.

Let's also not worry about the Lote Tuqiri snap illustrating a story about him and the ARU having something to hide - library images of footballer Tuqiri are a dime a dozen, and who knows this file image might have come from News Corp - but instead let's consider the strange case of the YouTube clip illustrating Paul Colgan's story Just what was it that made Ferris Bueller so great?

It happens to be a clip from Ferris Bueller featuring the Beatles' Twist and Shout.

Now here's betting that neither the movie makers (vale John Hughes) or the Beatles (vale John Lennon) got a dime from the YouTube poster, and nor will News Corp have offered up royalties for its shameless recycling of the content. Dress it how you will, on the face of it, this is a flagrant breach of copyright, which once used to (and still does in some cases) get major content makers agitated about YouTube. 

Is there any difference between simonetti2007 and Rupert Murdoch? Nope, because Murdoch's minions have embedded simonetti's work in their blog.

David Penberthy is on slightly safer ground by using an old clip of a TaB cola advertisement to illustrate his story on tackling the nudity question at Maslin beach - it's unlikely anyone will get exercised about the copyright in a 1982 TaB cola ad - but he does stand guilty as charged for featuring a completely irrelevant piece of borrowed content from YouTube. Hey the girl's in a red bikini, not nude, and WTF has TaB cola got to do with nudist colonies or the croweater nudists of Maslin Beach?

I could go on and on, but enough already. Almost all the visual content in The Punch is derivative, borrowed, second hand, used goods - ripped from the tubes or a library somewhere, purloined from YouTube, and uploaded with scant regard for traditional copyright law.

And The Punch isn't the only offender. Murdoch's rags have been making out like bandits for some time with "something borrowed" content to dress up their stories, and the more lowly the tabloid, like the Daily Terror, the more likely the photos of scantily clad bimbos have descended from another source. 

Just as the source of much of their big bloggers' content - the squillion hits for Andrew Bolt and Tim Blair - rip and reference content from all over the place, in the traditional manner of bloggers begging borrowing and stealing and calling it their own. Along with the right of punters to scribble their thoughts in a duelling banjos comments section. We should  pay for this?

In much the same way as the news stories are often just cut and paste jobs of original stories by AP or Reuters. Murdoch's rags might pay for this content, but there's plenty of other content where "finders keepers means it's free" is the go.

Of course ripping stories, photos, YouTube and other content is the sort of thing amateur bloggers do every day, and where's the harm in it - unless of course you happen to be a copyright owner and wonder why you're not getting paid. 

But where's the expectation that consumers would pay a large corporation to indulge in this kind of wild catting brothel keeping?

There'll have to be a major housecleaning and copyright owning cleansing. Instead of the majors thinking they can get away with charging for recycled content , they'll actually have to come up with a lot more of their own. And forsake linking to others in the same way that they will demand that others forsake the right to link to them. 

But that will need a lot of people coming on board, to pay for the newly elevated standards, and at the moment it's not looking so good for Rupert's gang as to whether the punters are happy to line up to be fleeced in the process of funding this new elevated content.

Here's the tone of comments on the news.com.au site from readers discussing News Corp's intention to charge for online content:

Assuming this has been accurately reported ... Now let's see. Delete bookmark. Navigate to different news site. Create new bookmark. Rupert who ??

When Murdoch talks about generating new quality content to tickle cash out of the wallets and purses of readers, how did News Corp manage to come up with The Punch, a half assed, poorly devised, under done imitation of a blog, cobbled together in a way that fails to match much more long running blogs put together with ten times more skill and drive elsewhere ... and still free ... and likely to stay free, even if the Rupert paywall clangs shut in their faces ... 

Meantime, if you're willing to pay for the kind of content currently on view in The Punch, you'd probably pay to be run over by a truck.

It's going to be a very interesting year on the intertubes.