In the first article concerning the NYT and the Huffington Post, the speaker was expressing concern that in his view there are many in the “world of the internet” who do little more than take someone else’s original writing, slip it into their website, and then promote their website as being the go-to place for current news. As is unfortunately all too often the case here, the speaker’s words were twisted to try and make the ludicrous point that everything is aggregation since, after all, does not the NYT use the words of persons who are the subject of news articles? Yes, this is called news reporting. Facts are being presented. However, those facts are woven into a news report that is an original work of authorship by the news reporter (keep in mind that reports by the AP are many times presented verbatim, but then that is because of a contractual arrangement permitting such useage).

Masnick’s deep seated antipathy to copyright law leads him to try and turn virtually every comment by companies like the NYT into a screed against what he terms “monopolies” (though, in fairness, there are others who likewise use the same term). Copyright is evil, unnecessary, and is used by holders of such rights to improperly stifle the actions of others.

He does much the same with patents, using the phrase “standing on the shoulders of giants” (i.e., those who have come before) to denigrate the law and inventors in general.

In a true apples-to-apples comparison, Masnick would have demonstrated that the NYT engaged in the activity it decries if here it had taken his original article, made only simplistic, minor, non-meaningful alterations and then passed it along as its own original work. Of course, the NYT did no such thing, so to try and use this situation to malign the NYT as not “practicing what it preaches” is disingenuous to a fault.

This is why I looked to copyright law to see how it relates to this situation. Did the NYT present an article of the type noted immediately above? If so, then it would most certainly be a copyright infringer absent fair use. Hence my question “What is your point?” Masnick wrote an article using his own original expression, and the NYT did likewise. Facts are not subject to copyright, but original expression is (the so-called “idea/expression dichotomy).

Simply put, I see nothing here that the NYT has engaged in the activity it deems inappropriate, and to state otherwise is nothing more than Masnick trying to craft an argument based upon a truly apples-to-oranges comparison.

Masnick does with regularity present thought provoking articles here, but this is not one of them.