David Mugo, the founder of Niaje is a vexed man. Earlier in the afternoon, I found a series of tweets he sent out to Citizen TV accusing them of plagiarizing his photography. i have been the receiving end of plagiarism and I can understand just how much it can offend a person -especially for a person who earns a living from their creativity. So when I saw the situation develop, I took a keen interest.
According to the series of tweets, David Mugo was accusing Citizen TV’s news crew and more specifically the people concerned with the segment called, “Citizen Weekend Fashion Watch” of plagiarizing some photographs he took in Nigeria while at the AMVCA Ceremony last week.
I reached out to David Mugo for a comment and he had this to say:
I David Mugo as a photographer and a digital content creator in a country where the mainstream media treats other people’s work as useless and worthless, have decided to take legal action on Royal Media Services if they do not contact me by the end of today, 17th March 2014 for using my pictures that I took on 2 occasions while I was in Nigeria between the 6th and the 9th of March.
The said images were used to make an entire show on Citizen TV’s prime time news titled “Fashion Watch” where the pictures were subject to scrutiny by the studio panel.
I took these pictures for my own use and only licensed Standard Media group for conditional use on Pulse magazine, which is where I assume Citizen TV lifted them from. When I contacted the Pulse editor who I dealt with in regard to these pictures, he was not even aware that they were using them on TV.
I spoke to Lilian Muli on Saturday evening after the show via Twitter and she promised they would get back to me by Monday morning, which they have not done so far.
I have therefore decided to proceed with legal action if they do not contact me by the end of today to ensure that they and others who have the same habit can stop using other people’s hard labour to make money without paying the source of the work.
I have all the original images which contain my camera and lens signatures, which means even if they wanted to deny it, they can’t. I will update you on the progress.
I have attached screenshots from their Twitter account of the pictures as they posted them alongside the broadcast.
I reached out to Lilian Muli for a response and she did respond to my phone call saying, “I cannot respond to the accusation.”
This is the offensive show in which the pictures were used:
{youtube}ZRsA9e4fAJg{/youtube}
