Plagiarism is the first rule of journalism: Kevin Smith is the co-founder of Splash News, one of the world's largest independent news and picture agencies [cujo moto é: "We cover the good, the bad and the very ugly"].
Key points:
* "Suing Perez Hilton sent shock waves through the blogging industry, resulting in a lot of bloggers becoming clients."
* Splash uses face-recognition software to check published snaps against its 1.2 million archived images.
* "Often we have to look into people, use private eyes to find out whom they are because often these people hide and use pseudonyms, but it's not that difficult to find people. The problem is that often when you track them down it turns out to be a 13-year-old girl who is doing it from her Dad's work laptop."
* "We have a company put an indelible watermark in the image; the image can still be used, you can't see it."
* Splash send out 10 'cease and desist' notices every day.
* Splash now deals with 250 blog sites: "It's really is a boom industry. It's like the gold rush again."
* Do you see blogs and message boards as potential clients? "I think we do so now, they are very agile and adept at knowing what the public wants… It's the way of the future and we can resist it, we just have to find a way of adapting ourselves and letting everyone now this is the way its done."
