22 March (Part 1) - The Piss Association
If you could cast your mind back 15 years and more you would find that blogs
were all the rage. There were five in the borough of Barnet pulling their Council
apart and I had a friend who banged the drum for the orchestra of which he was
percussionist. 853 in Greenwich (named after the phone code) and Arthur Pewty’s Maggot Sandwich
in Erith were others nearby.
Bonkers, kindly named by Councillor John Davey, got in on the act after Bexley’s
Highways Department blatantly lied about the wrecking of Abbey Road. Everyone was doing it! Blogging that is.
Councillor Read registered a blog name but never used it.
It was Councillor Craske’s weapon of choice when attacking residents and James Hunt ran a spoof blog featuring his dog Jasper!
Blogs were so popular and thought to represent the future of news propagation, that
OFCOM called all
the London bloggers together for a conference in September 2010. It was there
that I first met Hugh Neal of the Maggot Sandwich and realised that my digital camera was hopelessly outdated.
At some time since then blogs seem to have fallen by the wayside. There are only two left in Barnet and
853 has become a news website
rivalling what is left of local newspapers.
Somehow Hugh Neal has kept
his Maggot Sandwich going each Sunday and Bonkers struggles on with far fewer readers than used to
be the case. Unless Bexley Council reverts to full on criminality as was once
the case, Bonkers is never going to see 50,000 hits a day again.
If you keep in touch with
The Maggot Sandwich you will know that its author
has suffered very serious health problems for the past 15 months or so and is
now housebound apart from occasional trips in an ambulance. He has far too many
difficulties to contend with but if you
scroll towards the end of today’s effort
you will see that he has another.
His blog attracts external contributions from time to time and given his
immoobilty Hugh may rely on them more than me. My complaint is that almost no
one supplies photographs with their contributions whilst Hugh has fallen foul of exactly the reverse.
Unknown to him there have been four occasions over several years when the
photographs he was sent were not the sender’s own work as he had every expectation to assume. Now out
of the blue the Press Association is after him for copyright infringement, and
Hugh, not to put too fine a point on it, is absolutely stoney broke having not
been able to work for rather a long time.
The P.A. has been totally unresponsive to Hugh’s pleas and there is now a
possibility that they will have his blog closed down. The Press Association did
not warn him or ask him to remove the offending images nor have they been able
to show Hugh that the images they claim to be theirs are in fact so. Their only interest is extortion.
The Maggot Sandwich may go quiet for a while but I have assured Hugh that
that will not be for long. There are ways and means…
I have always taken the view that if I put an image on the web it is inevitable
that someone will make use of it. Somewhere on Bonkers there is a message to the
effect that anyone can help themselves without fear of a come-back.
I cannot think of any occasion when Bonkers has received a photograph which the
sender had not quite obviously taken themselves but it has certainly used
photographs from news websites with acknowledgements. What about the Estate
Agents photos that illustrate those house sales featured here every few months;
or screen grabs from Google Earth?
If copyright issues are taken to extremes, the web would be much the poorer for
it, but that apparently is what the Press Association seeks to achieve.
Hugh Neal on the left. September 2010.
Note: The Press Association now calls itself PA Media and is a private company owned by a consortium of newspaper companies.