Nicola D'Agostino (.net) - Articoli, traduzioni, grafica, web

Screen shooting is hard: let’s go shopping (for copyrighted blurred images)!

A recent opinion piece published on The Guardian’s website about Wikileaks is illustrated with a very peculiar image: a pedestrian hilarious close-up of a website, with credits given to a press agency and a photographer.

At the beginning of “Live with the WikiLeakable world or shut down the net. It’s your choice” there’s an image. It’s a close-up of Julian Assange’s face and the url of the Wikileaks website. The image, which is heavily blurred and badly cropped is followed by this credit:

Screen shot of a browser showing WikiLeaks’ home page and Julian Assange after the move to a Swiss host. REUTERS/Valentin Flauraud

Here’s a screenshot of mine of their screenshot, blurred and altered in a similar way:

screenshot of a screenshot
Credits: public domain.

This doesn’t make sense even moreso if you take into account how The Guardian is not a novice in Internet and technology matters.
Here are some questions which spring to my mind:

-) why The Guardian couldn’t do its own screenshot of a website?
-) why did it credit not only the press agency but Valentin Flauraud, a photographer, for a screenshot?
-) why is the screenshot so blurred?