Here’s the deal. Whenever possible, if I post a photograph on this blog, it must either have come from my camera or my archive, or if it didn’t, I must attribute the photo’s location to the best of my ability (i.e., linking to that website and identifying that the picture came from that website). If I post a YouTube clip, YouTube provides a web-formatted template that allows a person to view the YouTube clip, and then see other YouTube clips directly related to that subject. If I post an audio clip, most often it’s from iTunes and links directly to the spot on the iTunes store that allows someone to purchase the song if they so choose.
Copyright is very important. You never want to infringe on it.
During my time as a photographer with the Albany Patroons, I would put several photographs from each game on the Patroons’ website, and would carefully add a watermark to each photo so that if anyone wanted to order a copy of the picture, they could contact me for a high-resolution copy.
Unfortunately, the posting of images on the Patroons’ website had an unexpected side effect – at least two media organizations used my photographs for news reports, without crediting the source of the photo. This also included, in one instance, the media organization blurring out the copyright watermark that I put on my photos. They claimed it was fair use. I claimed that fair use doesn’t entitle someone to blur out the copyright watermark. I eventually got paid by both companies.
And apparently that was what finally did mlnsports.com in.
Around the year 2000, I was still looking for some writing assignments, and actually contacted a company called minorleaguenews.com. I spoke with the editor, Brian Ross, and we reached an arrangement on payment by word count. I pitched that I would be traveling to Hamilton, Ontario for an unrelated project, and offered to pen a piece or two about some of the Hamilton Bulldogs hockey players while I was there. He agreed to the articles. He also agreed to a couple of other pitches I had, including a three-part series on minor league memorabilia in the major league halls of fame, and a piece about the Cleveland area receiving AHL minor league hockey for the first time in a quarter-century.
I wrote the articles, provided photographs, and submitted everything.
And waited.
And waited.
Eventually one or two of the articles did get published – in heavily edited and trimmed form. I eventually received payment, but because the articles were “trimmed down,” my pay total was less than I had expected. That, and a couple of the articles never ran at all.
I contacted Brian and said that if the articles don’t run by a certain period of time, they will be too old to have any sort of relevance. He told me not to worry, that the readers on his website enjoy reading old articles, and that my pieces would run at some point in time.
One article that did get published, a story about the Pittsfield Astros’ only season in Pittsfield’s vintage Wahconah Park (before the team moved to Troy and became the Tri-City ValleyCats), received some other editing – in the form of editorial paragraphs added to the end of the article – paragraphs that weren’t written by me, and seemed to take a confrontational and opinionated stance on the subject of stadium replacement.
I stopped working for minorleaguenews.com after that.
My mistake was going back to work with them again.
We now flash forward to 2006. The American Basketball Association was about to hold their 2006 championship tournament in Rochester. I figured I could go to Rochester, cover the event for both minorleaguenews.com and probasketballnews.com, and between the two of them I should be able to make a few dollars.
I wrote the articles for both publications. Then I waited. Probasketballnews.com published the articles, but never paid me. Last time I work for them.
Minorleaguenews.com chopped my article up, ran it two months later, then paid me on a smaller rate.
Things later came to a head between myself and Ross over an unrelated issue, and for the better part of everyone concerned, I never wrote for that publication ever again.
Eventually minorleaguenews.com morphed into mlnsports.com, the “SportsZone,” a service that provided minor league RSS feeds and its own “Top 50 prospects” in both baseball and hockey.
But the last time I peeked at the Sports Zone page – just to see what was going on – the publication announced their closure.
“In our eleventh year, SZ, the first digital sports magazine on the Internet has closed as a result of web photo-use policies being enforced by major league organizations intent upon fans visiting “official” news agencies as your only news source and suppressing the Internet media with 72-hour photo and video use rules.
As the oldest voice of a professional free press on the Internet, we are sorry to have to close, but we have no choice. Our plan to go to PDF publication would not avoid these restrictions.
Any current subscribers will be contacted about pro-rata refunds.”
Hokey smokes. They can sugar-coat it by saying it’s a battle with “official” news agencies and where those agencies want their photographs to appear; but let’s put it this way – I wouldn’t spend the night with that excuse if it was dressed up to look like January Jones.
I can only speculate on what might have happened with the publication, but one thing’s for sure. I’m still writing and they’re not. QED.
Chuck The Writer 