Protect Marriage

A reader emails:

Protect Marriage’s comment policy, one they are breaking themselves.

Hello Whaleoil,

My name is Gabriel Rodrigues and I am an avid reader and huge fan of your blog and am wanting to voice my concerns to you about an issue relating to Marriage Equality.

As a supporter of Marriage Equality I was on Protect Marriage ‘Facebook page’ engaging respectfully with other commenters on the issue of Marriage Equality only to be blocked, and my comments in support in of Marriage Equality deleted. The comments were made in a respectful and considered manner.  Read more »

ᔥ the tipline

Whale,

As you’re probably aware, ProtectMarriageNZ recently used a song from YouTube without permission from their owners.

I thought you might also like to know that the wedding ring in their logo is stolen.

To be specific, they have literally searched “wedding ring” in Google images and take the first suitable result. (It’s about 6 rows down when I search, it may move up or down a little due to the magic of Google). This is a quite blatant form of theft, which Google has recently tried to address by including a ‘royalty free’ image search, but apparently they decided to ignore this and take the image they wanted instead.

The image itself is here – On The Grooms List - I got in contact with the site owner on twitter, they sourced the image from Prestige Wedding Bands.

I can’t see the image on their site, so it may be that it’s actually a stock image, but if that’s the case, I highly doubt they actually paid for rights for it (especially since every time someone posts this information on their Facebook wall it gets deleted quite rapidly).

It may be considered petty to attack them over something like this, but if you’re going to build an organization based around a moral standpoint, you should at least follow those morals through….and not steal songs or images.