Archives

Alyaum newspaper steals from a KAUST student blog

This article on Alyaum “اليوم” Saudi newspaper was stolen from this blog post by Nathan, a student in KAUST.

Another intellectual property theft by a Saudi newspaper. All I can say is “فضحتونا قدام العالم”.

alyaum-kaust

Via Indie Saudi.

Update: Nathan: “I do want accountability. What Al Yaum did was wrong, but the tone of the discussion is also wrong. Outrage does nothing to solve our problems and does everything to create even more.”

Al-Qabas newspaper plagiarizes an Arabic blog

Al-Qabas (a Kuwaiti newspaper) has published this article on their website. The article is an exact copy of this original post at Apple-WD with no reference to the source.

alqabas-image

If regular newspapers don’t respect intellectual properties, who will?

Saudi newspaper ignores Creative Commons

Sabq is not the only “Saudi Online Newspaper” that steals content from content creators and never credits them.

Alweeam has ignored the Creative Commons: Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported mentioned here. The CC means that you are free to share under the condition that you should attribute the work.

They have embedded the following video (video take from Saudi Arabia’s National Day celebration in 2009) without any attribution.

Even Alarabiya news channel is doing it. Same video posted on their site (WMV video).

I shared a similar video last year here with attribution to it’s content owner of course.

Photograph theft by Sabq “online newspaper” – updated

Update: Sabq has removed the photograph without adding any statements regarding the issue. They also censored all comments about the stolen photograph. From now on I will call Sabq (سبق) “Sarq” (سرق) as in “theft”.

In a news post ironically about theft, Sabq has included an image taken from Yousef Raffah without his permission.

sabq-steals-photo

Yousef Raffah is a photographer living in Jeddah and this is not the first time his photos were stolen. This is the original photograph:

3383922431_dc9ff96857_m

Sabq is an electronic newspaper in Arabic. They should respect intellectual properties and credit the photographer instead of stealing it like that.

Why don’t we give credit where credit is due?

Why do we (generally Arabs, mainly Saudis) always go out of our way to not give credit? Look at this funny cartoon:

pc-vs-mac-original

As you can see between the two cars, this image is made and copyrighted by “Daniel Bozet”.

However in this example the author took the time to crop out the credits from the image. Notice the crop lines between the cars:


pc-vs-mac-credit-removed

This image was used on SaudiMac by Yara and she did not remove the credit. Riyan-C uploaded the image on flickr and he credited it as well.

This is a serious issue in our Arab community and we need to understand the basics of intellectual property.

Update: The link was removed by the request of the author of that post, he commented that he found the image like that.