The following photo of Mohammed Abed Al-Jabri (Ar: محمد عابد الجابري), who died recently, was taken in 2009 by Fahd Alhazmi (فهد الحازمي).
The photo was taken during Riyadh Book Fair 2009 and posted here. Interesting note about the original photo, Mohammed’s eyes were closed and Fahd has edited the photo slightly.
Now it appeared in the following Saudi newspapers/news sites.
Good timing especially after the unfortunate things that happened here (Arabic post) but not here (English version).
The issue of Arabic content and intellectual property is serious. We Saudis will never understand or come to terms with copy rights or intellectual properties because we were never taught that in school (thanks Essam). It starts with copying a homework.
That original issue should be resolved by simply saying “this is a quote” cause it’s a full quote from my post. Looks like “through SaudiMac” is enough. kbo.
Anyway, Jassim has started a public discussion in Arabic on his blog about intellectual property. Feel free to join the discussion.
Update (26 April 2010): AlEqtisadiah has removed the article, nothing more. You can still find it if you searched for the cached version. Search for: cache:http://www.aleqt.com/2010/03/22/article_367381.html .
Update 2 (24 May 2010): AlEqtisadiah finally admitted and published a note about it here.
It is disappointing to see stuff like this. A well known Saudi newspaper published a plagiarized article.
Here’s the original post on March 18th 2009 titled “طعم النجاح.. خاطرة” and written by Muhammed Al-Saqaf.
Here’s the duplicate article on AlEqtisadiah newspaper on March 22nd 2010 titled “طعم النجاح” by Abdullah Alodaim. Adding a screen-shot:
Notice that most of the comments on AlEqtisadiah’s website has been censored!
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 (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.
If regular newspapers don’t respect intellectual properties, who will?
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.
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”.
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