2 replies to this topic

[megalithic.co.uk]

Have a read of this item from Stone Pages News:

http://www.stonepage...?showtopic=1538

The Megalithic Portal covered this news last week. We posted it on the 20th March.

The item about the Stone Circle was sourced from an unpublished page of Schottlandportal by our contributor Klingon. Schottlandportal saw the item and e-mailed me last week implying that we had somehow hacked into their site to gain this information (!) and asked us to remove it.

We explained to them that our contributor Klingon found the page via a Google search. Schottlandportal were not aware that Google had indexed and made this page public.

Klingon and I decided we would honour their wishes and remove the item, which we have subsequently done, along with site location pages that we had added. Again Google comes to the rescue as our original story is still in Google's page cache here and our Site location Page here (click on Google's 'cached' link).

Given all this, Stone Pages did not source this information from Schottland Portal as they claim, but did in fact they have copied this news item from the Portal without credit.

To Diego and all at Stone Pages:

I don't know how much of your news you source from the Megalithic Portal but I follow your news and I'm sure this is not the first time this has happened. We don't mind you following our lead, that's part of normal news distribution, but in future would you please credit us when you re-print news items that we have done the research on.

I imagine Schottlandportal will want you to remove the item of news as they asked us to do.

Thanks.
Andy

[Diego]

Dear Andy,
It would have been nicer from your part hearing our point of view before posting accusations on a public forum. In any case, as we don't have nothing to hide, and nothing to be forgiven for, this is what happened.

As you probably know, we have no editors helping us in our collection of news. That means that we usually make our "news hunts" just once per week, on Saturdays or Sundays. We've got a huge list of websites and news feeds from where we select the news we publish, and among them is - of course - the Megalithic Portal.

Regarding the Schottlandportal article, we actually noticed that news first on Bad Astronomy forum on March 25th, 2007. As you can see on their thread, there is a full quotation in German, a link to the Schottlandportal webpage and also a Google Earth image attachment. Of course, we also noticed the very same news the same day on your website, so we thought it was well worth publishing, as there were at least two independent sources citing it.

Please note that we haven't copied the text of the news you have published on your portal - we used babelfish to translate the original text posted on Schottlandportal - and we believe there is no point asking for a credit if you have just published a link to a page that is in the public domain, and that link is present in other webpages.

Regarding the request from Schottlandportal you received, we haven't heard a word from them yet. But in any case, as their page is on the public domain (otherwise they should have placed it on a restricted-access section of their website, or excluded that page from Google indexing via robots.txt), we will not remove that item of news in any case. We don't know about British law, but here in Italy there is something called "diritto di cronaca" (we believe you can translate as "right to report") that allow journalists - among other things - to publish any news that is in the public domain and that does not cause any harm.

So, please be assured that we have always (and always will) credited the Megalithic Portal when publishing an article written by you our your contributors - provided it is the original or the main/only source available, as it happened for instance for the following articles:

• Missed rock carvings found at Barclodiad y Gawres
  
• A new Megalith Map
  
• New rock art discoveries in Yorkshire
  
• Quarries threaten ancient English monuments
  
• 6,000 years at Chatsworth
  
• Prehistoric stone axe found at Ulverston

All the best,

Paola & Diego

[megalithic.co.uk]

The Bad Astronomy item was posted on the 25th, the same day as your item, a few hours later.  Bad Astronomy also got it from us.

I was in two minds whether to remove the item as I like to play hard with the news like you. But Klingon is in Germany as they are, he wanted to remove it so I honoured his wishes. Google comes to the rescue as the details are still in their cache.

No hard feelings anyway, just letting you know we're reading... Keep reading our news too...
Andy