Criminal Piracy, Plagiarism: Google takes down Linda Ikeji’s blog
Nigeria’s most successful blogger, Linda Ikeji, is under fire.
She’s severally been accused of plagiarism which is defined as “the practice of taking someone else’s work or ideas and passing them off as one’s own“. In fact, Linda seems to be mostly guilty of taking content from another source without permission or attribution techcabal.com reports.
Most recently, a certain @MrAyeDee accused her of using tweets and images he posted and using them on her blog without permission or attribution.
Linda’s
success is phenomenal. After 8 years of blogging, she has become a
poster child for digital success – a self-made woman who rose from rags
to riches with the aid of determination and the internet. She recently
caused a minor uproar when she celebrated her birthday by posting pictures
of her brand new Range Rover . Linda is a bit of a wunderkind in the
Nigerian context – a single woman who achieved success without any
obvious patronage from the establishment.
Yet, questions continue
to trail her operations – one of the most critical being allegations of
plagiarism from local and international sites. As we said earlier, the
source in question in this case is an individual who tweets under the
handle @MrAyeDee about security affairs in Nigeria, especially on the insurgency raging in the North-East of the country.
He told TechCabal that
he noticed tweets and pictures being used on Linda Ikeji’s blog from
around the end of September. Once he noticed this, he attempted to
contact Linda through the email address on her site before using Twitter
to reach out to her. He claims that the blog has used his content in
between 7-8 stories, but only made DMCA Takedown requests for 3. They have since been taken down. He claims that has not been able to make any direct contact with Linda.
As the controversy raged on Twitter, Uduak Oduok, a US-based lawyer who frequently comments on entertainment issues, revealed that the owner of the domain on @MrAyeDee’s Twitter profile –15past8.com – also owns LindaIkeji.net,
suggesting that the two had a history and that perhaps, Alexander was
guilty of domain squatting and perhaps to trying to extort Ms Ikeji.
Our investigation
revealed that indeed, the domains were owned by the same person –
Emmanuel Efremov. Alexander confirmed that his company – 15 Past 8 Media
– had acquired the LindaIkeji.net domain name, but he was not privy to
the details of his company’s domain operations. He however insisted that
they acquired the domain for Linda and have made no money from it since
registration. Our search confirmed that the domain has redirected to
Linda’s blog practically since registration.
We have reached out
to Linda Ikeji for comment but have yet to reach her. We will update
this story as soon as we get a response.
Is Using Tweets in a Story Plagiarism?
One of the questions
that has bugged me the most is whether it’s illegal to utilize another
person’s tweets in a story. I’m not sure the answer to that question is
“yes”. Here’s Forbes and Mashableusing
tweets and pictures from a user’s Twitter account to explain a story
about the Osama Bin Laden raid. Some have argued that the proper way to
use tweets is to use the embed function (that’s what we use on
TechCabal) but even Forbes sometimes uses screenshots.
What Next for Linda?
So where does that leave
one of Nigeria’s biggest content businesses? Linda Ikeji has obviously
been a victim of her success. She has built a remarkable audience and
generated lots of value as a result, proving that digital content is a
viable business. As a result, she’s got the attention of the public –
scrutiny was inevitable.
Linda’s business model
is predicated on ridiculously low overheads – she keeps a lean staff and
ensures that her content acquisition costs are low. It is
inconceivable that these attacks will reduce – and Linda might have to
invest in building her content creation team, thereby thinning her
margins in the long run. She might also have to invest in acquiring her
domains – which are owned by a bunch of people from Jonathan Santos
(LindaIkeji.com), Tosin Odunfa (LindaIkeji.ng), Twinpine Advertising
(LindaIkeji.mobi) and 15 Past 8 Media (LindaIkeji.net). Hosting a site
that some estimate delivers 500,000 page views a day will also not be
cheap.
But Linda is not a
stupid person by any stretch of the imagination. She’s navigated the
digital media landscape rather astutely, and private conversations have
shown that, as long as she hasn’t lost her edge, she should be able to
leverage this crisis to take her business to the next level.
courtesy techcabal.com
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