Temple: Photograph caught in spinning Web

Published October 14, 2006 at midnight

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Once upon a time, stories and photos produced by newspapers traveled about as far as trucks could carry them in one short night. Maybe a few copies spanned the nation, thanks to the U.S. mail.

In those days, it wasn't hard for an editor to keep track of how political candidates or advocacy groups were using - or misusing - the work of his staff to further their cause.

He might see their ads himself. Or friends or acquaintances might call and ask, "Did you see what so-and-so is doing?"

We'd contact the miscreants - again, usually somebody we knew - and inform them of our policy: that we do not allow the reproduction of our news stories or photographs for political ads. We take this position, in large part, because if our news coverage appears in ads, it could give the appearance that we produced the work to help a certain candidate, undermining the independence we believe is so important to maintaining your trust.

Those days of being able to pick up the phone and remind someone that they may be crossing a legal line weren't so long ago.

Now we live in a YouTube world. The online video site, which didn't exist two years ago, was sold to Google this week for $1.65 billion. Today it shows more than 100 million video clips a day, with more than 65,000 new videos added each day.

The Internet has opened the door for our stories and photos to circle the globe instantly, but it's also made it possible for people who have never heard of the Rocky Mountain News, and almost certainly couldn't care less about their relationship with it, to take our work and use it for their own purposes.

I'm not a lawyer, and I'm not paid to play one at the Rocky Mountain News. So I won't bore you with a lengthy treatise on copyright law. But let me just say that it's recognized that news organizations have the right to control the reuse of the photographs and stories that they publish. Of course there is something known as "fair use," which permits in limited circumstances the use of our material without our permission. So it's fair to say that this can be a gray area.

But imagine my surprise recently when a newspaper reporter contacted me to ask whether we had given Vernon Robinson, a Republican candidate for Congress in North Carolina, permission to use a Pulitzer Prize- winning photograph by Todd Heisler from "Final Salute" in one of his TV ads.

When we published that special section in November 2005, we saw Todd's photos ripple across the Internet. That was something of a nightmare for us, because we had tried to guard their use very carefully, recognizing that the families of the fallen Marines who had let us into their lives had not made that decision thinking their sorrow would be used by others to score political points.

So, for example, when we sold the pictures to reputable magazines - from Time to Paris Match - we put stringent requirements on how they could be used. (By the way, no money was accepted by this paper or the photographer. It was all donated to charity.)

Robinson, a former Winston-Salem, N.C., city councilman, has a blurb on his Web site asking people to join his "army." He asks for their financial support, without which he says, "I will not have the resources to bypass the liberal media and communicate directly with the voters through TV, radio, and mail. If you and I allow that to happen, the voters won't know anything about Brad Miller's radical, left-wing voting record and the closest I'll get to Congress will be watching it on C-SPAN."

One of the ads his supporters funded begins with the most famous photo from "Final Salute," the one showing Marines unloading a casket from the belly of a jet while passengers at each window look on.

The video camera moves in tighter and tighter for nine seconds while a narrator intones: "What kind of congressman would try to deny our soldiers the body armor they need to save their lives? The answer is your congressman, Brad Miller. That's right. Brad Miller did not vote for the appropriation that paid for improved body armor for our troops. But Brad Miller has no trouble spending your money. He would just rather spend it on sex. That's right." Then the ad gets really weird, delving into sex studies that you don't want to know about.

I understand the purpose of attack ads. But I do have a problem when people running for office, people who are eager to swear that they will uphold the Constitution, violate the law.

So after the call from the reporter, our librarian, lawyer and I spent countless hours chasing after Robinson's ad to get it off the air and off the Web, including YouTube.

My guess is that despite our best efforts you probably can still find it somewhere. I wish it weren't so. But this is no fairy tale. It's reality today.

John Temple can be reached at editor@RockyMountainNews.com or by mail at 101 W. Colfax, Suite 500, Denver, CO 80202.

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