Online publication Huffington Post, backed by beaucoup venture capital, stands accused of stealing content from other online publications. The publication is the house organ for political chameleon Arianna Huffington.
Online publishing etiquette has traditionally honored a “summarize and link” behavior when referring to existing content but Chicago Reader editor Whet Moser asserts the Huffington Post lifted entire articles. Not for the core Huffington Post—which would be bad enough—but for it’s Chicago-specific publication that competes directly with the Chicago Reader. Simply and totally unacceptable. Ryan Tate at Gawker calls the practice “straight jacking,” and charges that once upon a time the Huffington Post hijacked Gawker‘s entire RSS feed.
Meanwhile, layoffs in the Chicago mediasphere are rampant. Real people writing real stories are losing real jobs while Huffington is selling ads around their purloined articles.
Moser did a quick investigation and discovered that Huffington Post was blatantly stealing a whole bunch of articles from other Chicago independent online publications.
What’s especially disturbing about this is that Huffington Post attempts to justify its behavior as “good promotion” for the source material according to Tate who points out that Huffington has been doing this with many publications for quite some time. What’s disgusting is that this outright theft is actually Huffington’s business model. Fred Harman, general partner in Huffington’s venture capital firm, Oak Investment Partners, told the San Francisco Chronicle‘s Andrew Ross, “The Huffington Post benefits from a strong brand ... and an approach to content that leverages other news and blogger feeds in a manner traditional media players have not.” Indeed. Traditional media players tend to shy away from copyright infringement.
To date, Huffington has failed to respond to Moser’s complaints but Huffington Post co-founder Jonah Peretti found the time to blow smoke up the ass of Wired‘s Ryan Singel, attributing the dust-up to a “mistaken editorial call” and that the “intent” of Huffington Post‘s aggregation model “is to send traffic their [the source publications] way.”
Until a legal and ethical aggregation model emerges, online publications are encouraged to do what ARTS & FARCES does: license the use of your RSS feeds. If you don’t have one you’re welcome to use ours: please steal our syndication policy.
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