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It’s commercial misuse of someone else’s work.
would the contents of a post in the comments section under an article be part of his body of work?
edit: just seen the above post
didn’t brant richards use the comments a disgruntled customer made on this forum in the promo material for the last bikes he did for on one? made from gas pipe and will rust spring to mind.
a similar but not identical situation.
His latest venture uses snidey comments from social media in its advertising, amongst some interesting copy.
BruceWee
Like it or not, it is plagiarism. Unless you want to argue that it somehow falls outside the scope because it was in a comment on the article rather than the article itself.
It's plagiarism... but using a quote someone posted on a forum in an April Fool's post is hardly the most egregious example. If they had lifted his article and used it in actual advertising copy, fair enough.
I don't know many companies who would commission and pay someone to put an April Fools prank together as Starling did in this case.
Like it or not, getting exposure through clever use of social media is how many companies advertise these days.
As Max Dubler said in the blog I posted earlier, some companies take advantage of this grey area between advertising and social media to avoid paying photographers and it wouldn't surprise me if the same thing went on with writing.
I'm not saying this is what happened here, just that companies should be very careful how they handle their guerrilla marketing campaigns and avoid the appearance of trying to get something for nothing.
You can all stop getting upset now
https://www.starlingcycles.com/the-starling-fallacy-you-guessed-it-just-kidding/
This puts it all nicely to bed.
> https://www.starlingcycles.com/the-starling-fallacy-you-guessed-it-just-kidding/ <
For completeness, here's the apology posted on the Starling website here
Sorry for the repeat post 🙄