Linda Ikeji's Copyright Debacle
Linda Ikeji's Copyright Debacle
Nigeria's most successful blogger, Linda Ikeji, is under fire.
She is severally been accused of plagiarism which is defined as "the practice of requiring someone else's work or ideas and passing them off as one's own". The truth is, Linda appears to be mainly guilty of taking content from another source without attribution or permission. A specific @MrAyeDee accused her of using tweets and images he posted and using them on her blog without attribution or permission.
After 8 years of blogging, she's eventually become a poster child for digital success - a self made girl who rose from rags to riches with all the aid of conclusion as well as the web. She lately caused a minor uproar when she celebrated her birthday by posting pictures of her brand-new Range Rover . Linda is a small wunderkind in the Nigerian context - a single woman who attained success without the patronage that is obvious in the institution.
Yet, questions continue to trail her operations - one of the very most essential being allegations from international and local websites. As we said earlier, the source in question in cases like this is an individual who tweets under the handle @MrAyeDee about security affairs in Nigeria, especially on the insurgency raging in the North-East of the nation.
He told TechCabal that he noticed tweets and images used on Linda Ikeji's website from round the end of September. Once he noticed this, he attempted before using Twitter to reach out to her to contact Linda through the email address on her site. He claims that the site has used his content in between 7 -8 stories, but just made DMCA Takedown requests for 3. The have since been taken down. He claims that's not had the opportunity to produce any direct contact with Linda.
As the controversy raged on Twitter, Uduak Oduok, a US-based attorney who often comments on entertainment problems, revealed that the holder of the domain name on @MrAyeDee's Twitter profile - 15past8.com - also owns LindaIkeji.net, suggesting that the two had a history and that perhaps, Alexander was guilty of domain squatting and possibly to trying to extort Ms Ikeji.
Our investigation disclosed that really, the domain names were owned by the exact same individual - Emmanuel Efremov. Alexander confirmed that his firm - 15 Past 8 Media - had acquired the LindaIkeji.net domain name, however he wasn't privy to the details of his business's domain operations. He however insisted that they got the domain and have made no money from it since registration. Our search affirmed the domain has redirected since enrollment practically to Linda's website.
We've reached out for comment but have yet to reach her to Linda Ikeji. We are going to update this story after we get a reply.
Is Using Tweets?
One of the questions that's bugged me the most is whether it is not legal to work with another individual's tweets in a story. I'm not certain the response to that question is "yes". Here's Mashable and Forbes using pictures and tweets from a user's Twitter accounts to explain a story concerning the Osama Bin Laden raid. Some have asserted that the right way to utilize tweets would be to use the embed function (that's that which we use on TechCabal) but even Forbes occasionally uses screenshots.
What Next for Linda?
So where does that leave one of Nigeria's biggest content businesses? Linda Ikeji's site Ikeji has clearly been a target of her success. The has assembled a remarkable crowd and generated lots of worth because of this, demonstrating that digital content is a practicable business. Because of this, she is got the curiosity of the people - scrutiny was inescapable.
Linda's business model is predicated on ridiculously low overheads - she keeps a thin staff and ensures that her content acquisition prices are low. It's inconceivable these strikes will reduce - and Linda might have to purchase developing the's content creation team, thus thinning her margins in the future. Hosting a site that 500,000 page views a day are delivered by some estimate will also expensive.
But Linda is not a stupid person by any stretch of the imagination. She is navigated the digital media landscape quite astutely, and private conversations have shown that, as long as she hasn't lost her edge, she must be able to leverage this catastrophe to take her company to the next stage.
We await.
Nigeria's most successful blogger, Linda Ikeji, is under fire.
She is severally been accused of plagiarism which is defined as "the practice of requiring someone else's work or ideas and passing them off as one's own". The truth is, Linda appears to be mainly guilty of taking content from another source without attribution or permission. A specific @MrAyeDee accused her of using tweets and images he posted and using them on her blog without attribution or permission.
After 8 years of blogging, she's eventually become a poster child for digital success - a self made girl who rose from rags to riches with all the aid of conclusion as well as the web. She lately caused a minor uproar when she celebrated her birthday by posting pictures of her brand-new Range Rover . Linda is a small wunderkind in the Nigerian context - a single woman who attained success without the patronage that is obvious in the institution.
Yet, questions continue to trail her operations - one of the very most essential being allegations from international and local websites. As we said earlier, the source in question in cases like this is an individual who tweets under the handle @MrAyeDee about security affairs in Nigeria, especially on the insurgency raging in the North-East of the nation.
He told TechCabal that he noticed tweets and images used on Linda Ikeji's website from round the end of September. Once he noticed this, he attempted before using Twitter to reach out to her to contact Linda through the email address on her site. He claims that the site has used his content in between 7 -8 stories, but just made DMCA Takedown requests for 3. The have since been taken down. He claims that's not had the opportunity to produce any direct contact with Linda.
As the controversy raged on Twitter, Uduak Oduok, a US-based attorney who often comments on entertainment problems, revealed that the holder of the domain name on @MrAyeDee's Twitter profile - 15past8.com - also owns LindaIkeji.net, suggesting that the two had a history and that perhaps, Alexander was guilty of domain squatting and possibly to trying to extort Ms Ikeji.
Our investigation disclosed that really, the domain names were owned by the exact same individual - Emmanuel Efremov. Alexander confirmed that his firm - 15 Past 8 Media - had acquired the LindaIkeji.net domain name, however he wasn't privy to the details of his business's domain operations. He however insisted that they got the domain and have made no money from it since registration. Our search affirmed the domain has redirected since enrollment practically to Linda's website.
We've reached out for comment but have yet to reach her to Linda Ikeji. We are going to update this story after we get a reply.
Is Using Tweets?
One of the questions that's bugged me the most is whether it is not legal to work with another individual's tweets in a story. I'm not certain the response to that question is "yes". Here's Mashable and Forbes using pictures and tweets from a user's Twitter accounts to explain a story concerning the Osama Bin Laden raid. Some have asserted that the right way to utilize tweets would be to use the embed function (that's that which we use on TechCabal) but even Forbes occasionally uses screenshots.
What Next for Linda?
So where does that leave one of Nigeria's biggest content businesses? Linda Ikeji's site Ikeji has clearly been a target of her success. The has assembled a remarkable crowd and generated lots of worth because of this, demonstrating that digital content is a practicable business. Because of this, she is got the curiosity of the people - scrutiny was inescapable.
Linda's business model is predicated on ridiculously low overheads - she keeps a thin staff and ensures that her content acquisition prices are low. It's inconceivable these strikes will reduce - and Linda might have to purchase developing the's content creation team, thus thinning her margins in the future. Hosting a site that 500,000 page views a day are delivered by some estimate will also expensive.
But Linda is not a stupid person by any stretch of the imagination. She is navigated the digital media landscape quite astutely, and private conversations have shown that, as long as she hasn't lost her edge, she must be able to leverage this catastrophe to take her company to the next stage.
We await.