Take Me To Post Comment Form I'm curious why the Bulletin finds it acceptable for some users to post copyright protected images as "user photos" in the community section of this publication. The Bulletin has a sad history of allowing plagiarized material in the printed section of the publication as well as the online comments. Now, it would seem the Bulletin's lax attitude toward copyright law as now percolated into the online picture section.

All photographs were original taken by someone. I know this sounds trivial, but, it's important as this the many people's job. These people are generally paid per publication or website that licenses their photography, or graphic design, for their own use. Taking an image from anther website and reposting it without permission is analogous to shoplifting.

Some will argue that they are taking the images from Wikipedia and wikipedia is free, therefore, they can take whatever images they want and do whatever they want with them. These people have clearly not read the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license that governs the usage of many Wikipedia and Wikipedia Commons content. The "meat and potatoes" of this license is the following:

Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported , one is free to:
to share – to copy, distribute and transmit the work
to remix – to adapt the work
Under the following conditions:
attribution – You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).
share alike – If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one.


First, I see ZERO attributions giving credit to the original author in ANY of the plagiarized images posted here from Wikipedia. Second, by definition, posting to the Bulletin alters the image as well as the license to the Bulletin;s more restrictive commercial license - something that is explicitly forbidden by the CC-A-SA.

Plagiarism is a seri-os offense. It's sad that a supsed journalistic publication would have such little regard to protect copyright holders. Why hasn't the management taken some reasonable effort to help ensure that the Bulletin is not disseminating stolen material?

What steps should be taken to mitigate the Bulletin's obvious and continual problem with plagiarism?