A former Vietnam veteran wanted the American people to know just how easy it was for illegal aliens to cross our southern border, so he set up cameras along the route and posted the video on his website. Many people came to his website, borderinvasionpics.com (BIP), including the local CBS affiliate in Phoenix, KPHO.
The affiliate was obviously so impressed with what they saw, they downloaded and used some of the video in a sympathetic piece on illegal aliens.
However, instead of obeying the rules of Journalism 101 and giving proper attribution to the person whose time and effort went into the creation of the ‘shocking’ video, KPHO edited the footage into their own piece, zoomed in and cropped out the BIP logo and copyright, and inserted their CBS logo giving the viewing public the false impression the footage was a result of many months of hard work.
The owner of BIP was not impressed, especially as he is attempting to educate the American people as to the porous nature of the border; KPHO’s tone was much more sympathetic to illegal aliens:
Thank you for bringing attention to the KPHO theft of video from our website, www.borderinvasionpics.com.
You are granted permission to use any video from the BIP website in your effort to expose this incident.We routinely grant permission to re-publish our website content for informational, non-commercial use. We stipulate only that credit be given to BIP in a visible manner. CBS Phoenix affiliate KPHO did not request permission.
Our sole purpose for creating the website was to give uninformed Americans a graphic visual image of what illegal immigration really looks like, and to show the massive nature of it. The thousands of border intruders we show on the website are the result of a continual intensive physical effort and personal expense. Because our work is primarily carried out in very remote areas, an element of risk is also involved.
It is very disappointing to have a national news organization circumvent recognized attribution practice and use our copyrighted content to their advantage.
Thank you again for you interest in this matter,
Creator of Border Invasion Pics
It wasn’t very hard to find the clips KPHO used in their segment.
The BIP page had over 120 links to videos they posted. As I suspected, it was only necessary to check within the top five videos on the site. Anyone who would use someone else’s work and try and pass it off as their own, was lazy, and whoever compiled the video for their piece was.
We attempted to contact KPHO and find out if this was some grand misunderstanding and within 36 hours of its posting, their video was taken down from their website (an extraordinary occurrence), and we’ve received no response from the network affiliate.