Fluther accuses Jason Calacanis of content stealing

The concept of internet plagiarism is a matter of concern and we all know that. While we had brought this issue into limelight almost a year before (Code of conducts for bloggers), a new and far more serious issue has stirred this debate once again. This time the person under allegation is none other than Jason Calacanis. blog.fluther.com/blog (blog of a Q/A community, fluther) wrote an open letter to Jason about content stealing and hijacking them to his own concern, mahalo.com.

To quote blog.fluther.com/blog, they said,

We get it. You need to create doppelganger Twitter accounts to bolster your user base and create content. Perhaps some Twitter users are fine with the fact that their tweets are being co-opted by you to drive traffic. But we won’t allow you to strip out the attribution to our users simply to pad your own corpus of questions.

Read the full article

To which Jason had to say, politely

We’ll take down the account for you if it’s such a big deal. It’s like a half dozen questions that were imported by our user.

However, in your case I guess you think it’s going to make some huge difference to either of our sites. It won’t…. really. A half dozen questions out of 100k+ on Mahalo Answers and I’m sure thousands on your site don’t make a difference.

Also, frankly, I don’t think you can copyright a question asked in a public forum like Twitter… but who really cares. we’ll take it down and respectfully disagree and buy you a beer when we see you.

Now, let us date back to past.

Jason Calacanis, despite being an enviably successful web- entrepreneur, has had his share of controversies.

In 2006, Jason Calacanis (un)offically e-mailed several top users of social bookmarking sites like DIGG, Reddit etc to promote their stories there. Of course, it was savvy business strategy that he is known of but Kevin Rose didn’t take it too well, neither did anyone for that matter who wanted a more ethical and straight way of seeing internet contents flourish with quality (alas, quantity was a king then).

In 2006 again, Engadget (one of the most popular gadget sites in the world and of-course founded by Jason) was busted for unethical blogging by DAPreview and they clearly showed proof of how calculatingly they were blacklisted by Engadget without a healthy professional reason.