BuzzFeed is (in)famous for its photo gallery stories. A guaranteed click-through machine, but what about the ethics (and legality) of the practice?
Last month, in an article about copyright and photos for PBS MediaShift, I wrote:
In a sponsored post from 2010, BuzzFeed appropriated a copyrighted photo published first on The Daily Mail. The photo on BuzzFeed was cropped to remove the photographer’s ID and copyright line. And someone slightly modified the color of the sky.
Last year, Alexis Madrigal delved into BuzzFeed’s practice of lifting photos from the web. BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti argued “fair use”…
But it’s not just sponsored posts (aka ads). It’s regular “stories” too, as this deconstruction shows.
A friend shared this on Facebook: The 49 Most WTF Pictures Of People Posing With Animals.
I admonished her to not be a BuzzFeed enabler. Then I decided to check out the sourcing for each of the 49 images. (Yes, sometimes I’m a little OCD.)
Almost all of the images are lifted from Tumblr, lifted in many cases from someone who has reblogged the image and thus has no rights to the image.
Some are lifted from sites that say “all rights reserved” – a clear copyright violation. And by lifted I mean that Buzzfeed has made a copy of the image on their server; there may be a tiny link back to the account or site; in some cases, the link is to the home page and not to the image post. In a few, the links are 404 or useless. And Buzzfeed has done this despite the fact that some of these sites provide embed code; in other words, the Buzzfeed practice of not using the embed code violates the TOS on those sites.
Check out the details on all 49 photos.
Just say no to Buzzfeed. And for the sake of all that is holy, don’t share posts like these. It’s a corrupt business model. (We can talk about the Imgur and Tumblr business models another day.)
Known for gnawing at complex questions like a terrier with a bone. Digital evangelist, writer, teacher. Transplanted Southerner; teach newbies to ride motorcycles. @kegill (Twitter and Mastodon.social); wiredpen.com