Thursday, December 18, 2008
News / Chicagoland Grand Theft HuffPo
Posted by Whet Moser on Thu, Dec 18, 2008 at 12:13 PM
The Huffington Post's local "aggregation" wing1 2 straight stole our entire Bon Iver Critic's Choice--they didn't ask permission ("read the whole article"? that is the whole article, dumbass). Here's a screen shot (or click the thumbnail), since we're obviously about to ask them to take it down.
Update: I guess they left off the time, price, and Vic address/contact info. Perhaps that's what counts as "fair use" in this bright future we live in now.
I'm skeptical of places that mostly rewrite existing content without adding to it or making dumb jokes, but this is outright theft.
Local Web editors: keep an eye on them.
1. "ChuffPo", as I belive TOC Web editor Scott Smith cleverly termed it.
2. Also note the ginormous, ugly, pointless-to-the-reader tag cloud (click through to the screen shot if the page is gone). ONE DAY YOU WILL BE CALLED TO ANSWER FOR YOUR SEO DARK ARTS.
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This is their SOP. They've been doing it for a while now. Happens to our stuff all the time. What bothers me is the unclear attribution. It looks like original Chuffpo content save for the tiny line under the hed. Ideally, it would say "Chicago Reader Critics' Pick" at the top of the body in the same font size. I'm not the only one who's bothered by it. No less than Roger Ebert was confused too: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/09/11/roger-ebert-attacked-at-s_n_125575.html?show_comment_id=15613020#comment_15613020 (Writing as HollyMartinz in a clever nod to The Third Man)
scraping bits and pieces for SEO purposes is one thing--it bugs me, but i'm not going to stand athwart history etc--but i had no idea they were taking entire blurbs. that seems like a bridge too far.
Since HuffPo Chicago is the model Ben Eason wants the entire company to adopt, why not just aggregate back what they aggregated from you. In days, the entire Chicago metro area will collapse into a vortex created by a concentric RSS spiral. Then the survivors can Twitter it!
Speaking of lameness, let's not forget Chicagoist's policy of attribution -- after the jump.
Oh HuffPo! They did major stealing of election maps from NYT and other coverage in November. They are a complete bunch of thieves and for all their high minded principles they abuse fair-use and also hot-link other content. I could go on, but its just sad really.
Has anyone tried suing HuffPost for this?
This is clearly in line with the "HuffPoach" business model, as they don't pay their bloggers for posts either.
*Finally* someone trapped those plagiarizers and thieves. Cheers, Lori R. Price Managing Editor Citizens For Legitimate Government http://www.legitgov.org/
Why is anyone surprised? Everyone knows that Marxists don't have any truly new ideas, they just pretend they do. :o)
Thats why I have moved on to some other sites that use copyrighted stuff legally. There is a site www.politicaliq.com that has syndicated and legal videos. They even now show up as a little "widget" on politico.com and philly.com. You can even search within the videos
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