As some of you might have noticed we pulled back a post about BDSM Bad Advice and as we apply total transparency about what we do, here is the explanation to why this was done.
I published a post about a week ago about the wonderful things BDSM Bad Advice are doing on Twitter and on their own website. In this post I included a webcomic that they’ve started to do and it was also the thing that spurred of the post itself. I also included information taken from one of the owners bio, without quotation marks, as it was written in third person and precieved by me to be a part of an information package in the same category as a press kit. The name in the bio information was linked to the original website where I found it and I also included links to the owner’s Twitter feed, website and Tumblr.
A couple of days after my post was published I recieved a letter from the owner, whose bio I’ve used in my post, kindly pointing out the fact that we where committing a copyrights violation and that we should apply correct attribution to the place where the material originated from.
No disagreement on that part and we did a mistake by not asking if we could use the comic in our post which only had the purpose of ponting people to the work that these guys were doing. We respect intellectual property and would never use any material in a way that would make it look like it was our own.
Our sincere apologies has to go out to these guys.
The post was taken down because we made this mistake. I didn’t put quotation marks around the bio information, which could from one perspective be seen as a bad practice, but instead I turned one of the names into a hyperlink and by clicking that, the reader ended up at the main page of the website where I pulled the bio information from.
We were kindly requested to change the way we linked and we were also requested to put up quotation marks around the bio information.
I could have changed the bio information and integrated it a bit better into my own writing to make it look more like my own. I didn’t do that for a couple of reasons, one being the fact that the original bio was quite short and almost CV-like, the second was that it didn’t have much of a flowing story in it – It was rather short statements which I used as a background to the story about BDSM Bad Advice.
Quotation marks would also have been a bit wrong as I made a few minor changes in the text to make it suit the tempus I was using, and therefor I used a linking practice instead.
The owner didn’t agree with my way of attributing to the original site even if I used, in my opinion, a common practice on how bios are used on the web and true web attribution by hyperlinking a name so I decided to pull back the post to avoid any future conflicts.
We did a mistake by violating the copyright of the web comic and have complied to BDSM Bad Advice requests.