Matt Buck's Hack Cartoons

The Devil's Kitchen: Some opinionated bloggers like to boast about the size of their web statistics. And Devil's Kitchen has been hosting a marvellously profane and foul row between some big name Brit bloggers all about this. It's really quite entertaining in between all the jargon. To me, the stupidity of statporn and the endless human mania for measuring absolutely everything conjure up so many compelling images. Obviously, I ought to add here that I watch statporn too. The trick is not feeling one has to publish it to justify a place in any conversation. But in turn, this nice theory has a problem because when you are attempting to make a profit-generating business out of it, people will ask you difficult questions about your statporn.

Matt Buck’s animated drawings

Blogs and digital publications are starting to experience some growing pains about who owns what imagery and how each publication can use other people's digital content. The particular case I want to talk about concerns I and my colleague at Channel 4, Beau Bo D'Or, but there have been lots of other recent cases*. In ours, some of our work has been hotlinked on very popular blogs, notably Paul Staines’s Guido Fawkes’s Diary. There's a clip of one of the front pages of my animations here.

I want to make clear at this point that as far as I know, no one has complained, legally, about what he did, although I know Beau Bo D'Or (Neil Hepburn) exchanged several emails with Paul about it. The screen grab above of Guido Fawkes is interesting here (double click the image and look at the orange circle bottom left). There is also plenty of technical evidence he was hotlinking to Channel 4's servers, which is using** their bandwidth instead of his own. I was slightly surprised at this behaviour as Paul is reputed to be wealthy, or to have, access to the sort of funds which would allow him to pay for his own bandwidth. Bandwidth is the telecoms capacity which supplies us the pages we see on the web.

Tim 'Bloggerheads' Ireland has done a thorough job on explaining what has happened. Unfortunately, his initial investigation has got mixed up with the personal emnity which he and Paul Staines share. Paul responded by sending a threatening solicitors letter to Tim. This was a shame as it obscured the more important matter and this may, of course, been why he did it.

Paul and I, and other people like us, who are successful publishers and who are actively promoting our work for commercial gain have a responsibility to think about both what we are publishing - and how we are publishing it. I'd expect better behaviour from a man who chooses to associate himself with someone who wanted to reconfigure parliament.

Follow-up links: Technical
What is hotlinking? from Wikipedia

* Previous cases
Famous theft of images from digital to print from The Great Architect

** UPDATED: I have edited out the previous reference to stealing bandwidth after a comment from blogger John B who made comment 5 for this piece. Thanks for pointing that innacurate use of language out John.

UPDATED UPDATE
Why do all this writing about something so small? Perceptively skewered here

Personal:
Bloggerheads Tim Ireland
Guido Fawkes Paul Staines
Beau Bo D’Or Neil Hepburn

Matt Buck’s animated drawings

Returning visitors may know that from time to time I like to think about changing forms of creativity in drawing, and now is one of them. Some good and interesting things are starting to happen in the UK media which are really encouraging to see. Patrick Blower, who used to work at the Evening Standard when it still believed in publishing print news cartoons, has developed a method for drawing in a video which you can find, weekly, on Friday's, at the Daily Telegraph website. My colleague at Channel 4, Beau Bo D’Or has been branching out from his still photomontage into moving photomontage and is having a good deal of success with it. I have my own explorations in a hybrid form of print and simple animated cartooning and it must be working, as the notorious Guido Fawkes is starting to 'borrow' stuff - see below's screenshot web clipping from his site.

I am absolutely positive we three won't be the last either...on either issue. I note Mr Fawkes's support of the open digital rights group with a sort of smile.
UPDATE: Beau Bo D’Or writes (and comments)It's Guido's second offence. He used my Channel 4 animation without permission from C4 or myself. He ran it directly from my server which nearly crashed my site.

Matt Buck’s animated drawing

There's an interesting response to the end of Peter Hain's ministerial career from Mick Fealty at the Telegraph’s Brassneck blog. He praises the work undertaken by Guido Fawkes's diary, which is run by Paul Delaire Staines.

Matt Buck’s animated drawings

An unmissable pub crawl with Karl Marx (hat tip to Mark Crail)

Also, don't miss celebrity political blogger Guido Fawkes and his unwise foray into the world of the mainstream media and Newsnight. His film was good - and asked some sensible questions, but the decision to do an interview with Paxo and Mike White from the Guardian ... ouch!

An old problem has raised it's head again - people stealing your images and then passing them off as their own work.

One of my colleagues, Andy Davey, has found people 'borrowing' or stealing parts of his drawings for use in their photoshopped internet mash-ups. And they've been appearing on popular internet blog sites, such as Guido Fawkes and Ian Dale's Diary. The latest one turned up on Iain's diary over the weekend.

To be fair to Iain and Guido, both have sort-of apologised for using unattributed images, but there is a serious responsibility to check where artwork is coming from if you are going to publish it on the web.

Old media had to develop a system of employing artists and creators to help decorate their products, it would be nice to think that successful web sites could start to think about doing that too. After all, the visitor benefits are obvious - everybody likes drawings which are rude about politicians.

Perhaps one simple solution would be for all artwork posted to political blog sites like these to be signed - and noted with a URL - that way, we get to know who thinks what. And also, Andy would have some chance to track down the person who 'borrowed' his work.

There is an interesting exchange between my colleague Morten Morland and Iain Dale about this issue at the link below.

Face-off

Some of Andy Davey's borrowed belongings