RayBaseley

I’ve seen Caolan Robertson’s response, where he acknowledges lifting our video. He blames it on his editor but ultimately takes responsibility. It’s always good to see people own their mistakes, it makes this space better for everyone. I appreciate it and accept his apology. The five seconds of video is easy to dismiss, but five seconds of an animated map takes hours of work — research from a journalist and manual work from a videographer and a graphic designer. Our video team is small but we do our best to make sure our video reporting is well researched and properly sourced. Caolan @CaolanReports says he wants to learn from this and improve his practices. I think that’s the right call, especially since other journalists have spoken out about past cases where Caolan used their work without credit. Hopefully, this will be the push to review those practices. It would help to look into the video’s origin before launching a public attack, too. As for further steps. Caolan says he emailed us to resolve it. We have checked our inboxes, including organization’s and my own, and found no messages from him. He is very welcome to reach me or the team directly. A private conversation is always more effective. On the copyright claim. Yesterday, Caolan filed an appeal to our claim with Youtube, which automatically blocks our right to retract the claim while the appeal is being considered. That said, we decided we will not contest his appeal or take legal action about the copyright infringement. If we don’t participate, YouTube will likely remove the strike from his channel. We made this decision because Caolan acknowledged his mistake and pledged to improve. I hope this ends it and we can all move on and focus on our actual work: bringing truthful reporting from Ukraine to the world.