Engadget: Busted for Unethical Blogging -

Engadget: Busted for Unethical Blogging
March 20, 2006 | by Ian Bell

Popular Blog Engadget.com gets caught stealing other website content and posting it as their own.

Engadget.com, one of the nets largest gadget blogs was caught today stealing pictures and editorial content from dapreview.com, a website that focuses on digital audio player reviews and news. Stock images and photography provided by product manufacturers often get circulated without proper permission, but are hard to track down. But when dapreview.com had one of their writers personal photos stolen from their site, there was no doubt that wrong-doing was in the works. Engadget had originally posted the Dapreview picture showing the sites watermark clearly visible on the picture, and citing them in the article, but shortly after, cropped the image removing the watermark and changing the link to another site, as if the picture and story was theirs.

"However, on the revised version of the same story, the link to DAPreview was removed and it has a chopped version of our picture with the DAPreview logo cut out. We do have a problem with this. They have deliberately circumvented a credit to DAPreview. Instead, the story now links to another blog (mobilemag) that covered our story. This is equivalent to ripping us off."

You can read more about this story complete with pictures from DAPreview.com.

Other sites covering this story include:

Digg.com

HardOCP.com

Post Your Comment...Comments

fungku on Mar 20th, 2006 at 3:42 PM:

figures. they've been doing this for a long time, it's just the first time someone made a stink enough about it to submit to digg.

Tantrum on Mar 20th, 2006 at 4:02 PM:

hahaha I love it! About time they got busted. I stopped reading their site a few months ago, I got tired of their garbage and decided to use Digg instead. I do miss the pictures though, but no way would I go back after seeing this.

Hugh on Mar 20th, 2006 at 4:03 PM:

Wow that is a complete rip off, I can't believe they thought they could just crop the image.

Techyo on Mar 20th, 2006 at 4:03 PM:

Hmm looks like Engadget has been doing this for a while. Hand caught in the cookie jar yo!

Jason on Mar 20th, 2006 at 7:11 PM:

It was an error. We attributed the story to the wrong person. When we found out it was an error we fixed it. It wasn't unethical, it was a mistake... and one that we fixed instantly.

Ray Bright on Mar 21st, 2006 at 2:25 AM:

It sounds like this fight has even become news worthy for our guys down under and its spreading like wild flower.

http://www.mp3direct.com.au/news/default.asp

I think without explaining we know who did wrong and they have said sorry. Let's all live in this wonderful world, Together.

Ray

iPodMC on Mar 22nd, 2006 at 12:11 PM:

http://www.ryanablock.com/archive/2006/03/controve...

"The post in question today is one I later edited under pretenses that the watermark was autogenerated — as they very often are"

Ryan is stating that he thought DAPReview automatically generated that watermark, and assumed it was not their image, but someone elses.

These excuses are getting more lame.

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