Via discussion on this blog, it appears that Matt Drudge is being careless about copyright issues when he uses photos from other sites. I knew that Tom Tomorrow had accused him of using his photo without permission a few years back, but from Tomorrow’s inflammatory comments and projections on the subject I read online, I wasn’t sure how seriously to take them.

Following is the most recent viewer comment on the subject:

He’s mostly going to Yahoo images. From there, if he sees a pic of a person or object he wants to put on his site, he’ll look at the source code of that page and he’ll grab the pic out of the page’s source code (for an example, he’ll copy the image tag - - and paste it in his source code on his own page).

How do I know this? I did a copy cat the other night of a pic of the whale that was in the Thames River in London (this was displayed on Drudge Report’s page). I looked at his source code, went to Yahoo images, type in “whale in London”, found an article w/ the same pic of the whale (which was an AP photo) that was on the Drudge Report, looked at the source code, found the image tag and copied/pasted it on a test page of mine - it was the same photo.

…This link goes directly to the pic of the whale. Pretty simple what he does actually. I really do think that he should have put “AP Photo” underneath the jpg since it really is the property of AP.

I don’t think for a second that Matt has dishonorable intentions. He probably uses the same logic of many, if not most, bloggers and site owners: everyone knows I’m not passing this off as mine. I think he’s being careless and getting stories out there as soon as possible…but that doesn’t relieve him of responsibility. Especially when some of his special reports have read “XXX MUST CREDIT DRUDGE REPORT XXX”.

Unlike Drudge, I’m crediting Mark Shrigley for his work in tracking down several of his recent photo sources. Thanks for your input, Mark.