16th aug, 2011

If politicians don’t follow copyright how can you expect others to do so?

Generally I don’t think that politicians should be morally superior to the rest of the population. One thing I do expect from them however is not breaking the law. The Danish prime ministers party (Venstre) has just launched a smear campaign to kick off the election coming soon.
The campaign uses a photo of the prime ministers two main opponents. The embarrassing thing is that they forgot to ask the creator of the picture who has the copyright for permission. The party claims that its ok to borrow pictures from opponents. The really interesting part is that the party decided to change the photo used in the negative campaign after being contacted by the photographer…and forgot to ask the copyright owner of the new picture for permission. That’s two strikes in a row. Next time we will cut their access to pictures!
Even though it’s only a few pictures and not worth a lot it shows exactly why it’s hard to convince the general public to stop pirating copyrighted material. It doesn’t seem like a big crime to copy without asking permission.

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