“The Austin Chronicle has a bone to pick with Sen. Cornyn”
Well, you’re darn tootin’!
That’s the caption of a blog post at Texas Politics, blog for the capitol bureaus of the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express News, who wrote up the Cornyn campaign’s theft of our video blog Hail to the Hustle’s footage of Rick Noriega. (The Association of alternate Newsweeklies is on it too.) TP quotes Cornyn spokespeople Dave Beckwith and Kevin McLaughlin as calling their appropriation “fair use” – a rather dubious claim considering the length of the footage they took, and that it’s used to advance a partisan political agenda, and not in a newsworthy capacity.
As for their use, we’ve filed a DMCA complaint with video host Blip.tv, but they seem to be dragging their heels. However, that’s our best hope, as the Cornyn campaign is either completely intellectually dishonest, or astonishing in their sheer breadth of stone-ass ignorance. (Newsdesk hasn’t ruled out some mixture of the two.) When we emailed them to tell them to take their video down, one of their responses was, “Once YouTube puts it on the Internet, isn’t it considered in the public domain?”
Eeesh.
And if you haven’t Hustled yet:
This article appears in October 24 • 2008.