David Pearce formerly owned a wine merchant company called the Wine Vault, and he authored the book Wines of Australia. David has just launched a new e-newsletter called “Weekly Wine Round Up,” with the first edition going out on July 1, 2008.
A preview is available for you to see from the Archives on his website Weekly-Wine.com. His newsletter is mainly going to be a sign up page, but interviews and tasting notes will be archived on the site as well.
The newsletter will deliver to its readership a round up of articles published on what he considers the internet’s best wine sites and BLOGS. The lead article each week will be from Jancis Robinson with other sites and Blogs alternating. Think of it like a really good RSS feed, but done manually with logos and more content. Imagine an article on terroir one week on Juicy Tales. David would lift the first paragraph from my site, and insert it onto his Web newsletter, with a link for the reader to read the full article on the author’s own site.
For David’s newsletter, there will be a Global, US, Australian, and possibly a South African version. All will carry similar content, but will be bias towards individual countries in their content. So the US one will have US content etc.
How do I feel about my content being used, because I know this is an issue plaquing the Internet’s original authors?
At this point in time, I don’t mind my content being used on other sites, as long as there’s credit being given…
I was recently disturbed, however, when I discovered on the back end of my blog the lifting of an image that I had purchased and used from a photography site where images must be purchased. I had to sign a limited release contract during the purchasing process, so the use of this image has the potential to come back to haunt me. Why? Because I wasn’t asked, not did I give permission for this image’s use, for which I’m now responsible. I had to find out on my blog that it was illegally lifted. Consider… I blog on non-billable hours. That means all that I’m doing is uncompensated, and yet I compensate Melanie Hoffman and Katie Kelley to review wines for the site. Consequently, this blog is costing me money. To have anything – including an image that I’ve purchased – be lifted and used on another site without asking or crediting Juicy Tales, is just wrong. To have this simply spread around the universe as one’s own under these conditions is copyright infringement. I can see where this is ultimately going in the Internet world, but it must also happen in a global, legal sphere. That means that it’s a long time coming before everyone’s properly given credit for where credit is due. This is the site where you’ll see the fire fighting image they used on July 22, following my blog entry on July 21, 2008: Find a Wine
As with any site, one can easily monitor these kinds of infractions, and prove the error of their ways by dates in the site’s history. This now also means that the Find a Wine crew have been put on notice, now knowing how that action is viewed.
As for David Pearce’s site, he asked, I granted, and what’s written for content now has reciprocal respect with twice the impact because we’ve properly shared. Enjoy his condensing of sound bites offerings.
Recent Comments