Daily Archives: July 22, 2006

No, really guys, time to grow up

I love Boing Boing, but sometimes its attitude to elementary things like "fact checking" and "not ended up looking like an arse" leaves something to be desired. Take, for example, its story on "YouTube’s new policy says: we own your content". Publishing a clip from YouTube’s new terms and conditions which, it claimed, showed the company’s desire to own all the content uploaded to it, it stirred up what can only be described as "a shit storm".

Unfortunately, Boing Boing had ignored the two most important sentences in the T&Cs: "For clarity, you retain all of your ownership rights in your User Submissions" and "The foregoing license granted by you terminates once you remove or delete a User Submission from the YouTube Website." And it’s not like you don’t notice these things if you actually read the T&C’s, as they bracket the passage the Boing Boing DID publish.

Boing Boing has a massive readership and lots of influence. It’s time it stopped doing this shit, and started doing some elementary fact checking BEFORE it publishes a story. The "we’re only bloggers!" excuse won’t wash.
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