This entry was posted on
Saturday, January 20th, 2007 at
2:57 am and is filed
under The Political Weblog Movement.

[Image via Samizdata. Published under Creative Commons. Image resized and enhanced.]

A few days ago, Jackie Danicki sent me an email demanding that I remove a photo of Paul Staines from this key post on my website.

She claimed to be the owner of the photo. She also claimed that it had been published with “all rights reserved”.

However, the photo was sourced from this page (where the photo in question is still live at time of posting) and on that page, the named publisher is Perry de Havilland. Most importantly, on that page (even three days after Jackie Danicki’s claim/demand), the ONLY notice regarding copyright reads as follows (the link to the relevant licence is included):

All content on this website (including text, photographs, audio files, and any other original works), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

My use of the photo was completely in keeping with the published licence. If anything, I was overly cautious/generous.

However, I agreed to Jackie’s shrill demands for one very, very good reason:

Paul Staines, posting under the pseudonym ‘Guido Fawkes’, quite rightly objected to the News Of The World attempting to censor weblogs and websites that dared to publish images of the opportunistic entrapment-monkey brave undercover reporter Mazher Mahmood… but this intervention made Staines and his backers look incredibly similar to the bullying mainstream mattress-stains that they claim to despise. (In other words, whether he instigated it, approved it or just tolerated it, this action made Paul Staines look like a total bloody hypocrite. And a censor-happy one at that.)

However, Jackie Danicki also went on (and on) to publish her claim that I had stolen the image in the comments of Tom Worstall’s website and in the comments of Stuart Bruce’s website. You can see the latter webmaster’s understandable reaction to this development here.

Anybody with brains should be able to see that the point of the original post was not simply to ‘get Guido’ (No. 11 alone would have done far more damage), but to raise some important points about common sense and common bloody courtesy.

To make this kind of claim on your own website is one thing; to make it on someone else’s goes beyond rudeness. In most other circumstances, it would have resulted in legal difficulties for both webmasters and/or their providers (happily, in this case, there is goodwill to spare and a point to be made).

Jackie Danicki did not even have the decency to publish the claim at her own website!

Instead, she left others to bear responsibility for her claims… and when I say ‘left’, I mean she made her claims, was challenged with pretty much the same detail you see at the top of this post, and did not return.

I hate cats.

I know that seems kind of random, but it’s pertinent:

I mainly hate cats because they have a habit of shitting in every backyard but their own.

Jackie Danicki did her little shitty and did not clean it up. She didn’t even scrape a few blades of grass over the top before jumping over the fence and darting away.

Of course, she could always claim that someone else left one of these claims, as only one of the sites involved requires any form of registration for comments… but that simply helps to prove my point about how we *might* wish to think about how we conduct ourselves in the future.

So… someone should be cleaning this up, and on the face of it, it appears that Jackie Danicki should be the one donning marigold gloves… and apologising to at least three people.

(Of course, I could have emailed Jackie privately about this, but the claims were made publicly and my hands are tied regardless; she responded to my last email with the single word ‘unsubscribe’, and I fear this legal expert may have me arrested for spamming if I attempt to communicate via email. In fact, if she chooses to get in touch in the coming hours/days, the first word of her initial email should, technically, be the single word ‘subscribe’.)

[‘Guido’: Don’t even start with the wah-wah-wah-Tim-Ireland-in-my-comments crap unless you can – at the very least – identify a comment of mine that you deleted where I made a libellous claim about a third party. And even if you can stretch your way to that, we’ll only be at the *start* of the conversation… that you have so far failed to engage in.]