News Corp. filed a lawsuit against Briefing.com in New York on Wednesday, alleging the site “stole” Dow Jones content.
In a statement, Mark Jackson, an attorney for Dow Jones, said Briefing.com “has been brazenly taking a free ride on the reputation of our publications and on the investment Dow Jones makes in quality, real-time journalism.”
The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, details Briefing.com’s “systematic and often instantaneous misappropriation of headlines and articles from Dow Jones Newswires.”
Briefing.com did not immediately return a request for comment. The company provides market-related content for other publishers, including Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters.
According to Dow Jones, during a two-week period Briefing.com “copied a substantial portion of at least 100 articles and republished more than 70 headlines within three minutes of the initial publication on Dow Jones Newswires.”
"Dow Jones invests considerable resources to produce timely and trusted news and business information," Jackson said. "Dow Jones respects and defends the rights of other news organizations to report on news events in a timely manner. Here, however, Briefing.com did not use its own resources to uncover, verify and describe news events. It waited for Dow Jones to do all the work, and then simply copied the content.”
Content “theft” one of New Corp. chief Rupert Murdoch’s chief pet peeves. He has accused Google of similar theft of News Corp. content for indexing in the past, though has stopped short of suing the search giant.
