https://www.aol.com/article/news/2017/03/07/white-house-copies-full-paragraph-from-exxonmobil-press-release/21875307/
A full paragraph from a press release by ExxonMobile was copied into a White House press release. Does this violate copyright law?
Politicians do this all the time. A copyright claim usually involves damages. ExxonMobil was not expecting to make any money from their press release.
A press release is sort of intended to be quoted.
Publicity material by its nature is intended to be disseminated. You’d be surprised how many newspaper articles consist of press releases. This has been true since the 19th century. Lots of features on television news are generated by the vendor as well.
Ideally, the source of the material should be cited. But that’s because a non-cite if discovered makes the reprinter look bad, not because any violation has occurred.
Yeah, here’s a little article I found about press releases and plagiarism in the newsroom. They (the PR Society of America) argue that “with certain exceptions, the purpose of a news release carries an implicit consent to re-use and publish the news release’s content.” Which sounds about right to me. It’s lazy as shit as a newspaper or other news source to just publish it as is without any attribution (we’re supposed to be journalists, not PR guys) but it does happen.
ETA: OK, that’s specifically plagiarism, not copyright law. But if I, as copyright holder, give you permission to use my work unattributed, I can do that. I presume Exxon doesn’t give a shit and is more than happy if politicians just print their releases verbatim in their work.
Isn’t that the point of a press release? It’s text that’s being released to the press for them to use.
Why wasn’t it cited and quoted properly?
If a student did this in an assignment, they would be severely punished.
Because this wasn’t a student assignment.
Regards,
Shodan
Because we hold 18 year olds to higher academic standards than we do the Executive branch of our government.
The purpose of a student assignment is to teach the student how to prepare and write a paper. The content of the paper isn’t what’s important.
But a news article is supposed to be conveying information and a press release is supposed to be conveying the message of its originator. In these cases, the content is the reason for the report.
So copying somebody else’s words in a student assignment is a violation of the intent of the work. Copying somebody else’s words in a news article or a press release may be wrong in some situations but it doesn’t violate the intent of the work.
What academic standards do you expect a White House press release to have? It’s just a press release like any other, and self-serving/one-sided like any press release is.