Has Iain Dale been caught stealing from the BBC?

This entry was posted on
Wednesday, February 6th, 2008
at
11:47 am and is filed
under The Political Weblog Movement.

You can see Iain Dale bitching about the BBC and the dreadful waste of licence-payer’s money in one sense or another here, here and here.

Meanwhile, if you look at the code for Iain’s dandy new site design, you will see that the icons for his link-whoring widgets…

… would appear to the untrained eye to be drawn (or, if you prefer, leeched) directly from the BBC’s web servers:

[Note – I wasn’t clever obsessive enough to find this myself; Garry (a fellow member of the vast leftist conspiracy) had to find it for me.]

1. A bit inconsistent, don’t you think? I mean, you can waffle on about scale all you like (it’s about 2Kb and change with each download) but if you don’t like being called a hypocrite (and Iain doesn’t like being called a hypocrite), then you can’t go around bitching about how this or that is a waste of a licence fee when you yourself are hoovering up the BBC’s resources in order to promote your own website.

2. Does Iain have permission to do this? I mean, the BBC offer advice on these widgets here, but I’ll be damned if I can find a page on their site that invites the public to leech the relevant icons for these widgets directly from their servers.

Just asking is all. I wouldn’t want to accuse anyone of stealing without proof.

Iain? Any response*? Have you been stealing from the BBC, or am I missing something?

[*Iain: Please note that quietly changing the code while ‘ignoring’ me technically counts as a response, but I’d much rather that you were polite about it.]

UPDATE (07 Feb) – The leeching from the BBC has been described as an “oversight” and a “mistake” by Iain’s web designer (who made the same error on his own website) and the relevant code has been corrected, so Iain was leeching from the BBC without permission, but isn’t at present. I suggested a modest donation to Children In Need to make up for it (i.e. to bring balance to the equation in a way that would allow Iain to continue to bitch about licence fee wastage in the future without risk of being called a total hypocrite). This idea was considered… and then rejected*.

[*Tch. Won’t somebody pleeeease think of the children?]








About Tim Ireland

Tim is the sole author of Bloggerheads.
This entry was posted in The Political Weblog Movement. Bookmark the permalink.

11 Responses to "Has Iain Dale been caught stealing from the BBC?"