Florian's Blog

The Death Of Arrogance

Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009

I’d like to start this post with a statement: I’m not a journalist, I’m not a professional blogger, I don’t get paid – directly or indirectly – to write, I don’t have any ads on my Posterous or my blog. I’m just a nobody with a big mouth. Finally English is not my native language.

Yesterday a debate started on Twitter after I shared an article taken from Yahoo! Finance and posted in extenso on my Posterous page.

For those – like Charles Arthur- who do not know the way Posterous works, here is a small tutorial.

You surf the web – find an interesting post and want to SHARE it.

Then once you press the Share on Posterous button you have :

Et voila – content is shared and all credits are given to the original source here:

Basically Posterous sharing ie Digg, Techmeme, Google Reader is identical as a ReTweet of valuable content.

Now back to yesterday’s incident.

I shared the following: http://florianseroussi.posterous.com/ten-big-companies-that-are-veering-toward-ban reproducing EXACTLY what was posted on Yahoo! Finance page. Exactly. Giving credit to Yahoo! and Business Insider as per the original post.

You will note that Yahoo! has a generic link to Business Insider but not to the original BI article.

Charles Arthur then asked why didn’t I link the original Business Insider post. Tried to explain how I used Posterous add-on to share content but Charles didn’t know anything about Posterous.

Mike Butcher – Techcrunch UK editor- jumped on the bandwagon without checking the facts thinking I simply reproduced a paid content without giving any credits. Once Mike understood his mistake he blamed me for not finding the original post and manually adding a link to the Yahoo! re-post.  It was simply a ridiculous claim but I searched the internet, found the link and added it to my shared content credit to appease boiling journo blood. As someone mentioned to me via DM – Mike Butcher was much more eloquent to defend the right to publish stolen documents on Techcrunch aka Twittergate. Journalist bullshit duty I guess.

Charles Arthur lost the plot, comparing cars, free content, source code and who knows what all together. Within hours- Charles tone went from arrogant to sarcastic to insulting.

Ilicco Elias tried to minimize the incident but Guardian editor was not ready to give up so easily.

My buddy Paul Walsh came to the rescue with a fair statement:

Charles still on a roll threatens to sue me and foresees a class action against Posterous starting soon (ahem)…

At last in a final act of bravery Arthur decided to block me and called me stupid after I mentioned The Guardian.co.uk had lost over £24M.

Mr Arthur – as the tech editor of The Guardian who do not have a clue what Posterous is – you should have a much more humble attitude.

Journalists – your current business model is SINKING. You are dying slowly with 20^th century principles. Wake up! Look around. You do not have the monopole of information and sharing. We – your readers- have the ability to share, produce and rate content the same way you do. The only value added you can provide is by doing a better job – not by shutting us down.

Note: I didn’t want to go on the legal approach of copyright et al on this post. I’m not an attorney and IP laws (international laws should I say) are too complicated for a blog post. Yahoo! quickly replied to my email and stated they are not involved as no logo or Yahoo! material has been shared.

Hopefully Charles Arthur will use last pence of The Guardian to start a worldwide class action against Google and Posterous to prove his point and whatever the outcome shall be – we will burn in golden letters on The Guardian’s headstone : The Death Of Arrogance.

UPDATE Sept 24 : After an email exchange with Charles Arthur I have modified the Posterous post to an excerpt only – adding another link to Business Insider [there are now 2 links, one on header and one on footer]. It would be interesting to know the conversation rate between hits on my Posterous to links onto BI but my guess is we will never know.

Tags: charles arthur, copyright, ilicco, journalism, mike butcher, paul walsh, posterous, TechCrunch, the guardian, twittergate
Posted in Content, Economy, Legal, London, Newspapers, Social Media, TechCrunch, Technology | 91 Comments »