Plagiarism? Piracy? Not here.

If there's one thing I keep struggling with in Iraq, it's the idea that copyrights, for anything, mean nothing.

It's all fun and games when you're driving by the Max Toast's golden arches or picking up a fresh copy of Sex & The City II from the bazaar.

But in my opinion, many people here have a totally different, and from my view, incomprehensible opinion on personal rights to one's own work and information.

Here's a quick story for you. Just a few days after arriving with Iraq, Jon and I had a meeting with the Hawler, a local paper here. The editor gave us a bunch of their weeklies to flip through as we were talking and as Jon started checking out the first of the stack, he stopped dead. "This is my picture!"

The editor leaned over to check out the page.

"I took this two years ago, in Erbil!" Jon was incredulous. The paper had been printed two weeks before.

The editor took the paper, looked at it and laughed. "We should have at least given you an attribution!"

[Jon's snap of his snap published without permission, attribution, or compensation.]

Similarly, after publishing a recent blog on the Huffington Post, I got a message from a Kurdish journalist thanking me for writing the post and letting me know that he was going to translate it into Kurdish and publish it in his magazine. There was no question of permission or consultation, just a friendly FYI over Facebook that it would be printed for Kurdish readers in a local magazine. Blog posts are often reposted with attribution online -- they're the type of content that fall into the hazy milieu of things that should be spread quickly and easily, but written by people who are often working just as professionally as print journalists or photographers. It's not uncommon to have a blog republished on five or 15 other sites. So in this case I swallowed my usual objections and asked politely for a link to see where my work was being placed. I got the link to it today, which, considering it's for my article, I have no problem showing you guys here:

[You can see a larger version by checking out Page 2 at this link: http://en.calameo.com/read/000206241ef82f5e7d7a6]


But as you can imagine, with two such recent run-ins with copyright infringement, I find it a little hard to swallow that cavalier attitude toward taking people's work, online or in print. Plagiarism is plagiarism, no matter what you're stealing or how you're using it, if you don't give the owner credit.

I'm having a hard time explaining the importance of this to our students. For our first assignment, we asked each of them to create an interactive timeline about their family history, to get the basics of telling stories in a visually engaging way. We asked them to collect stories from their families, as well as family photos and pictures of artifacts from their homes to help them tell their story.

Imagine my surprise when, as each student stood to present, they proudly showed us their family's stories accompanied with some of the most iconic photos from the last 20 years in the region. There wasn't any shame there -- many students had used the same photos as each other in their timelines. It wasn't like they were trying to hide the fact that the photos were stolen from the Internet. It was just that there was nothing wrong with it. We requested all the students remove photos that weren't theirs from their family histories.

During the second draft presentations, same thing. Internet photos abloom, all across the timelines. Again, we said, why would you want someone else's photos in your family history? Take them off.

So now I'm wondering how to make this lesson stick. It's hard in a place where journalism is undergoing a sort of Renaissance, where papers are plentiful and successful in their own ways, to explain that it's this sort of glib attitude toward the value of people's work, toward reusing it without proper attribution or compensation and in the process devaluing it, is a huge contributing factor to what's killing American newspapers.

I'll be the first to admit I am definitely a hypocrite in this - somehow it seems way worse to me to see a photographer or a journalist struggling to pay the bills have their work directly stolen, than to see a movie or brand be pirated. Having a face on that money lost, that career waylaid, makes it harder to be blase about piracy and plagiarism. It would be hard for me to see someone's picture on the back of a book jacket before I photocopied from the book's pages. 'Cause I'm right there with them.

I want to tell my students, take these people's work, and you're taking their living, and then no one can enjoy the fantastic pictures they shoot. But I'm not sure how to make that lesson sink in yet, and I'm a little afraid that when it does, it's because the journalism industry here will have been troubled by this attitude just as the American industry has, and that Iraqi journalists will be struggling to pay the bills because of it.