The Blog

well put.

This is unprofessional on huffpo's part and makes everyone, minus the sites and authors they are stealing from, look bad. Next time this happens, and they steal the image in the article as well, replace the image source with a note to their readers!

Get a lawyer. And the next time she goes on Bill Maher, throw shoes. Sick of her.

I can understand taking parts of an article,with credit and a link, and tossing the copied part into block quotes. Entire articles? That's eating someone's lunch.

Yeah, they've "aggregated" Gapers Block content as well. It's frustrating as all get out.

Another aspect to consider: Aggregation like this isn't simply an SEO play -- they're selling ads on the backs of other site's content, without any sort of license or revenue-sharing deal.

Good point, Andrew. It also waters down the ad market, I would think--making the vessel bigger with other people's work. I'm still really pissed.

whoa, did you just use "bush league"?

good for you...I still can't quite believe this

They don't even pay the majority of their bloggers. The Huffington Post is the future of journalism for those who do not know how to use a search engine. Other than that it is a waste of time and VC money.

Great job, Whet. I'm not sure if they've ever done this to Chicagoist content or not - we're checking as I type - but fantastic work bringing this to light.

This is a clear and present illustration of the danger that faces all genuine journalism, print and digital alike. People who say they don't read print because "I can find everything I want online" simply do not understand the extent to which the content they find has been lifted in from places that pay professionals to gather, verify and organize that material into coherent form. It takes human labor to acquire this content. That's the bottom line. As long as people think they can find reliable information "for free," the foundations of professional journalism -- from calendar listings to investigations -- are undermined. Nothing automatic about it, people. This stuff come from real people doing real work, and those who lift it without credit or recompense are lying to you -- and cheating those who did the work in the first place.

Whet, you won't hear back from Arianna; I made several requests for an interview with her last year on the same subject. (As I'm sure you found out, the HuffPo Chicago office doesn't have a listed phone number.) She's got all the time in the world for Larry King and Bill Maher, but not a minute for the papers that her Web site scrapes. I'm the editor of the Gambit down in New Orleans (you know, that place with the football team that the Bears love to beat), and we've had it with her brand of "progressive" journalism. First it was not paying her bloggers; now it's taking, wholesale, the work of others without recompense. I won't blogspam you here, but we wrote up your experience on our blog and said: "If you or your minions ever copy-and-paste anything out of our copyrighted publication (or from our city’s fine bloggers), you’ll find out just how P.O.’d we can get down here in the 504. "We don’t need you, we don’t want you, and we’re not scared of you. We’ve got Southern lawyers, we’ve got righteous anger, and we’ve got bloggers with tongues sharper than a Beverly Hills surgeon’s knife. "And if Chicago wants to lead the charge against your faux-”progressive” politics, we’ll be in lockstep behind them. Just don’t touch our stuff." Seriously, I'm ready to raise hell over this with any AAN members who want to join me. Maybe we can think of something together.

I've never--and never will--read the Huffington blog. But do they sell ads through Google? If so, send Google a complaint. There's a federal law against what they are doing. Google will tell you what to do next to file a complaint, and then Google will send them a note that it is a violation of their agreement with Google. If thye don't sell ads through Google, you can still take advantage of the federal law. Check out the govts' Web site.

they been doing the same thing to big sites too ... why doesn't somebody step up and sue them?

Hopper blogged about it http://tiny.abstractdynamics.org/archives/010905.html

It's not really that complicated. Have the Reader's lawyer send a cease and desist letter. There's nothing even partially legit about this.

I'm a blogger at Bnet who covers media. I'll post what you have discovered (though not in its entirety!) and link directly to you. Nice work!

And as of this moment, 24 hours after Whet's original post, ChuffPo remains atop the Reader in a Google search for "Bon Iver Vic." In happier Googling, the kerfuffle is the No. 1 hit for "straight stole."

I like the way Huffpro has a "read the whole story" link that goes straight to the entire blurb that they completely lifted. End of story, really, and totally inappropriate... However, as others mentioned, if they had 1) Asked permission, and 2) Referenced Jessica Hopper, and maybe a link to her blog, or just the review I think there'd be no issue. More traffic to Reader, recognition of a writer's efforts (and existence), all good. As for Web traffic, as someone that sells online banner impressions, and pay per click advertising (not for a newspaper), that really is the future of advertising, and, as much as it sucks you can't have quality, professionally trained, insightful, real reporters on staff without someone funding them, and advertising is obviously suffering right now. What also sucks is that advertisers now want guaranteed ROI, aka sales or acquisitions as a result of their advertising investments, and just think of how impossible that is in this economy?! I heard anecdotally at a marketing event that Chrysler only wants to "buy ads that work." Well, how about making efficient cars first, or loosening up credit so people will buy cars, and carmakers will then buy ads, and journalists will continue to eat? And, while I know no one wants to hear this part either, I am also going to say that I'm kind of annoyed with the elitism that exists between journalists and the fat cat Zells at the top of the newspapers. There is such a distate for advertising among some writers, yet it is what allows traditonal media to exist. Also, there IS a difference between the men in suits that don't really sell ads, and the very people that are pounding the pavement every day, and convincing advertisers to continue advertising, even as their returns become increasingly diminished, or harder to quantify. It's what we in sales call "a hard sell," and it's getting harder all the time. Kind of makes me want to sit on my couch for 10 hours straight and watch Mad Men!

I've always wondered where they were getting all this stuff. I'd assumed they had revenue sharing agreements with people. Now that they've come local I see that they probably do not. In my case, I broke the "Sarah Pain nude portrait" story on the Windy Citizen. Our story doesn't even crack the top 10 for results for that search, even though most of the top 10 results are using our photo, text, info and linking to us. ChuffPo is in the top 3. Admittedly, I sent most of those sites the link to the story in order to get buzz about it. Them's the breaks. So the HuffPo is violating copyright and profiting from it. Ok. They are running ads from at least two services on their site: Doubleclick (owned by Google)and something called Adblade that I've never heard of. The Terms of Service laid out by Google for Adsense prohibit advertising on sites that "infringe on the rights of others." https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=48182 However, I just spoke to someone at Doubleclick and he said that Doubleclick has no rules against running their ads on sites that lift content. His advice was: 1. Go straight to the HuffPo. 2. Hire a lawyer. He also said that no one had every come to them with this complaint before. I left a message with the people at http://www.adblade.com but no response just yet.

this fron the huffpo site: 4. If you are a copyright owner or agent thereof and believe that User Content infringes upon your copyright, please submit notice, pursuant to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (17 U.S.C. § 512(c)) to our Copyright Agent with the following information: (i) an electronic or physical signature of the person authorized to act on behalf of the owner of the copyright; (ii) a description of the copyrighted work that you claim has been infringed; (iii) the URL of the location containing the material that you claim is infringing; (iv) your address, telephone number, and email address; (v) a statement by you that you have a good faith belief that the disputed use is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law; (vi) a statement by you, made under penalty of perjury, that the above information in your Notice is accurate and that you are the copyright owner or authorized to act on the copyright owner's behalf. Our Copyright Agent can be reached as follows: By mail: HuffingtonPost.com / Attn: Copyright Agent / 560 Broadway, Suite 308 / New York, NY 10012 By phone: (212) 245-7844 By fax: (646) 557-0803 By email: copyrightagent@huffingtonpost.com

Also (and this just came out of a conversation with someone else in this thread) in my mind, I've ignored this by comparing it to how YouTube handled things, building a business on the back of stolen content so you can get big in a hurry. That's how Digg and all these other sites work, and in some ways we do similar stuff on the Windy Citizen, letting people share links to local stories. But it was pointed out that YouTube content is user generated and employee moderated while this is employee moderated AND generated. So while YouTube can hide behind the DMCA provisions which protect service providers as long as they take down material that's been deemed illegal, the HuffPo doesn't have that recourse.

I also notice that huffpo provides full text feeds of some of its original content. what's good for the goose is ...

They provide full feeds for the blogs and partial on their "news." Yup.

A few things to consider based on the above links. If Victor Navasky could not win a Supreme Court fair use case for publishing hundreds of words from Gerald Ford's 110,000 word memoir, then there is no reason to believe that the HuffPo could win a fair use lawsuit for liberally reprinting articles without the editors' permission. Fair use requires upholding four characteristics. And seeing as how the HuffPo has modified their pages (after your discovery) to quote 30 words instead of the entire 100 word capsule from the Chicago Reader, seeing as how they have NOT provided commentary, and seeing as how this is all being republished with commercial use in mind, a strong case can be made against the HuffPo is in serious copyright violation even with these corrections in place. Controlling SEO like this does indeed produce an unfair commercial advantage, particularly when it comes at the expense of writers and editors. Fortunately, there are laws in place to prevent this.

sorry folks. information wants to be free. think about it.

Sorry, Freenick, we've thought about it, and yours is a commonly misunderstood maxim. Information wants to be free in the same way that contents under pressure want to be "free," not in the way we wish beer would be "free." And don't confuse "information" with "work." "Bon Iver is playing at the Vic at 8 p.m." is information. A preview of said show is work.

I hate HuffPo. All they do is scrape off AFP, AP, and other agencies' stories and the site is only 10-20% orignal.

Plain and simple this is theft. What a shocker the people at HuffPo have no morals. We should all set up wordpress blogs and start scraping their content. Heck, if they are getting ad clicks off your content they might owe you some cash.

Oh, and their could be a duplicant content penalty involved here. (Not sure)

I called it Huffington Com Post. Now I do see it is a lot of Re-posting. I noted they have a lot or recent capital infusion. Must be part of the Madoff group of funds.

what? puffho is not a legitimate site, no journalistic standards, no integrity, and gasp...steals stuff? i'm shocked, shocked i tell you...that it has taken this long for anyone to notice.

I'm with most of you who can't believe it has taken this long for this to become a story. Huffy gets credit for other peoples work. See this yahoo story giving undue credit to huffy: They write "and the hosting site was promptly overwhelmed by political oglers." And the link was to huffy. Huffy linked to Bauer-Griffin. http://buzz.yahoo.com/buzzlog/92124?fp=1

Question? Why would Huff Po ask permission to aggregate feeds when they don't pay their writers for the content online? Does anyone know if bloggers wrote Huff's book for her? Were they paid?

There is no honor among liberals

Arianna Huffington plagiarizes material. It is as simple as that. News organizations simply don't get to report, "hey check out this complete article another news organization has published". It doesn't work that way.

Arianna Huffington plagiarizes material. No question and for quite some time. It's pretty brazen considering she fancies herself as a sort media watchdog. Huffington Post also stages news and then reports it as an exclusive. She is by no means, or should by no means, be considered the future. She's a full blown opportunist and that's all.

You are "presuming for the moment that none of the other publications have given Huffpo permission." If you had done your job as a reporter, you wouldn't have to presume, and your article would be credible. And most of these commenters aren't questioning your claim, even though you state that you have no evidence whatsoever except for your own publication.

Dave did you bother to click on the screen captures the reporter used as evidence? Please take the time to read the material before spamming nonsense, kthx.

It is unfortunate that this happens. The worst part is that the stolen posts generate no traffic for those that created them. There are tools to help with this. Tynt's Tracer adds an attribution link to the bottom of copied and pasted content. Trevor www.tynt.com

Dirty trick to all concerned by P.J.