Ellen Wallace
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The president of Telecom TV, the company that recorded live many of the highlights of World Telecom in Geneva the first week of October, has been the victim of an unusual form of Internet theft: his online history of what happened has been significantly rewritten and republished by a group of Zimbabwe journalists who describe themselves as exiles – and his name has been left on the story. GenevaLunch, in a blog post Friday, asked Martyn Warwick, if he had given permission for the drastic changes to what he had written. Here is his answer:
“My company, Telecom TV is reporting, writing, webcasting and televising content from ITU Telecom World 2009.
I saw Mugabe on Wednesday. Indeed we were filming him and I was less than a metre from him as he tottered round the show clinging on to the hand of the Deputy Secretary General of the ITU. His visit threw the organisation into a real tizzy, I can tell you.
We also filmed Mugabe’s strange musings at the Council of Ministers meeting.
As for my story, the dreaded Zimbabwe Journalists not only nicked my story, lock, stock and barrel, but (unforgivable this) substantially rewrote it, changed the entire thrust and nuance of the piece and then conflated it with another piece by another hack. They have really p****d me off. No contact from them, no permission granted by me or my company. What they have done is not fair use, it’s blatant, arrogant copyright and IPR theft and completely illegal.
I have been a journalist for 35 years and have seen stuff appropriated in the past but this is beyond a joke. I’d chase ‘em down and sue ‘em but what would be the point? And anyway, life’s too short to worry about talentless, thieving, conniving cretins who don’t have the wit or intelligence to write their own copy and are utterly devoid of regard for the niceties of journalistic convention.
Let’s face it, they are not journalists, they are faceless apparatchiks and sod the lot of them.”
Links to other sites: Martyn Warwick’s article on TelecomTV, Zimbabwe Journalists’ version of the article, authors’ name intact but no link to original
GenevaLunch, 12 October 2009.
Filed under: Media
Tags: Geneva, ITU, journalists, Robert Mugabe, Telecom TV, World Radio Switzerland, Zimbabwe
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
October 12th, 2009 at 4:17 pm
What do you expect? You have all been in anti-Mugabe feeding frenzy for ten years and incestuously published each other’s musings as credible journalistic fact. So what? Let them plagiarise you. You have all been plagiarising each other for a decade whenever the story was anti-Mugabe. So, good for you mate!