Reader slams Huffington Post on aggregated content practices
December 19, 2008 at 6:35 pm by Alejandro A. Leal in NewsThe Chicago Reader, CL’s sister paper, is a bit miffed that the Huffington Post, “The Internet Newspaper,” is copying content willy-nilly, and repurposing it within their own site.
Anyone familiar with Arianna Huffington’s brainchild website knows that a big part of their model is to “aggregate” content aka, copy/paste/link it. Anyone also familiar with copyright law knows that the so-called “fair use” doctrine has its limits, and the jury is still out on whether HuffPo’s model is “fair use” or “fair steal.”
As my colleague Whet Moser writes in his Chicagoland blog:
The Huffington Post’s local “aggregation” wing 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.
We’ve had our own internal debates about copyright infringement and the like, and in fact, we contacted the HuffPo ourselves about their usage of one of our photographs on their site (here’s the screen capture in case it gets taken down).
They’ve since credited the source of the photograph, but ask Joeff Davis (and any copyright lawyer) — they’ll tell you that this is infringement and/or plain ol’ theft.
(And for those of you paying attention, yes, we too aggregate, but we actually just link to external sources, we don’t add an extra page in between you and the destination.)
December 20th, 2008 at 5:01 pm
i’m curious, isn’t that the same thing you guys do with flickr photos? just scroll down and there’s an example of a recycling pic you have from flickr.
correct me if i’m wrong, but just because a photo is on flickr doesn’t mean it’s fair use…unless you contacted the photographer and received permission/paid them.
December 21st, 2008 at 12:40 pm
I aggregate for events, birthday parties, corporate speaking, etc. Beats clowning.
December 21st, 2008 at 6:54 pm
What CL does with flickr photos is quite different. On the left-hand of this page, CL shows thumbnail-sized photos recent added by the photographers to the CL Atlanta flickr pool; photographers are voluntarily participating. Moreover, CL doesn’t copy the flickr photos to its site, but rather shows the flickr copies of the thumbnails inline on its site AND links the thumbnails to the originals on flickr.
Incidentally, just found another more responsible site, BNN, comparing its own aggregation practices to those of huffpo:
http://www.blognetnews.com/blogs/broadcast/?p=103
December 22nd, 2008 at 10:32 am
Dunl is right, Flickr is a little different. We have a Flickr group through which we ask Flickr users to participate so that we can feature the most recent pics on the Flickr badge on our site.
The recycling photo is used under a Creative Commons license, which allows for fair use just as long as you credit the source and link back to the photo page. Flickr allows you to search for CC photos using their advanced search option.
December 23rd, 2008 at 11:17 am
This story is getting bigger.
http://blog.wired.com/business/2008/12/huffpo-slammed.html
August 10th, 2009 at 10:24 am
I’ve run into the photo-reuse issue as well. They’ve used more than one of my flickr photos (and 99%+ of my flickr photos are “All Rights Reserved”) without permission, and simply claim that my photos are CC 2.0 when they aren’t.