Huffington Post accused of copyright infringement

By Michael Fraase

Sunday, 21 December 2008 01:40PM CDT

Section: Intellectual property

CopyrightOnline 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.

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