There was an interesting piece by Solomon Hughes in yesterday’s Morning Star about the surveillance of picket lines by Special Branch officers during the Wapping dispute 25 years ago. But it wasn’t so much the text of the article that caught my eye when I was handed a free, complimentary copy of the paper outside TUC Women’s Conference in Eastbourne yesterday morning, but the images that had been used to illustrate the article.

Because I knew I’d seen those images somewhere before….

Here, have a look:

And now here’s a piece I wrote last year about the dispute – The beast at the gate. Scroll through it and check out the images/newspaper clippings I used to illustrate it.

Coincidence?

Obviously not. Especially not when you look closer at this scanned headline from the Guardian of May 5th 1986:

Image from the Morning Star

Image from my blog post

As you can see, I’m pretty rubbish at cutting in straight lines.

Now I’m not going to accuse the Morning Star of breach of copyright or anything, because to be honest I’m pretty sure I don’t have any kind of copyright over newspaper clippings, or over leaflets and badges that other people designed and produced. In fact truth be told, I wasn’t even sure when I  wrote that post whether I was ‘allowed’ to even use those images myself, being as they weren’t my original work but simply ephemera I’d collected at the time and then scanned and uploaded to my computer.

What I am going to accuse them of however is piss poor etiquette.  And of failing to take note of the Creative Commons Licence at the bottom of this blog’s sidebar. The licence that says:

You are free:

to Share — to copy, distribute and transmit the work

Under the following conditions:

Attribution — You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).

Noncommercial — You may not use this work for commercial purposes.

Maybe I missed the bit at the bottom of the Morning Star article that said: ‘Images courtesy of Cath Elliott’s Too Much To Say For Myself blog.’

But I don’t think I did.