KEYBOARDS AT DAWN

Moneyweb takes Fin24 to court

BUSINESS news website Moneyweb, which is controlled by Caxton, has filed papers in the South Gauteng High Court to stop rival Fin24, owned by Naspers, from stealing its articles.

In the application, Moneyweb editor Ryk van Niekerk accuses Fin24 of plagiarism, unfair competition and copyright infringement. Van Niekerk said that Fin24’s practice of publishing barely rewritten stories and headlines from Moneyweb at virtually no cost was jeopardising his website’s ability to attract its share of visitor traffic — and advertising revenue — from unique content it cost thousands of rands to produce.

This clash between the two business news rivals will be keenly watched, partly because it is taking place as news websites are struggling to find a workable revenue model to support online journalism, and partly because it falls into a legal gap because there is no copyright law directly governing online content.

This is the first legal challenge of its sort in South Africa, but it will be important as more websites pop up that ‘‘aggregate” content from elsewhere.

Van Niekerk says: “It’s a highly technical legal issue. That’s why we’re doing this — to find out what’s acceptable and what’s not.”

He said Fin24 was running a low-cost business based around syndicating content from wire services rather than generating unique content — arguing that it had crossed an ethical line by plagiarising Moneyweb’s content to save costs.

Geoff Cohen, CEO of 24.com, said his company disagreed with Moneyweb. “We believe that at no time did we infringe copyright or pretend to pass off the work of others as our own. Content was clearly attributed and linked, thereby providing valuable exposure, transfer of audience and strong benefits for search engine optimisation — a common practice among digital publishing operations.”

In his affidavit, Van Niekerk, who was previously an employee of Media24, said he had first become aware of Fin24’s plagiarism over a year ago in several articles, but initially didn’t act so as to keep good relations with Fin24 and because the stolen content was about “softer” issues which he did not consider a core competitive advantage.

But this changed when Moneyweb published two breaking news articles about the Defencex Ponzi scheme this March.

Van Niekerk said he then found that Fin24 had lifted these articles without adequately acknowledging the source, using rewritten sentences — so he didn’t hold back.

He said Moneyweb had spent a lot of resources and money on investigating Defencex, to pro- duce the unique content.

“The publication of the article resulted in an absolute traffic explosion on the Moneyweb website.

“The article received close to 45 000 page views in four days. To date this article has received more than 70 000 page impres-

There is no copyright law directly governing online content

sions. To put this increase in traffic into perspective, a Moneyweb article that receives more than 5 000 page views or more is regarded as very popular.

“The article also received the most page impressions since I joined Moneyweb in September 2011,” he said.

Fin24 then hired a freelance journalist to cover a Defencex event in Johannesburg — a practice Van Niekerk claims was out of the ordinary for Fin24, which typically dedicates few resources to news issues and virtually never sends its own reporters to cover events — but he failed to arrive at the venue. Instead, Van Niekerk said, the exclusive report from Moneyweb, which took skill and money to produce, was simply copied.

Though large parts of the Moneyweb article were copied, the headline and introductory paragraphs caused particular chagrin — only one word had been changed from Moneyweb’s version.

Van Niekerk said that even where Fin24 had alluded to content being sourced from elsewhere, it typically did not mention that the full article was available at the original source.

Fin24 tweeted a link to its Defencex article, not a link to Moneyweb’s original version.

Van Niekerk approached News24 editor Jannie Momberg, but he was asked to put his concerns in writing.

But Momberg said that the Fin24 article was simply “a good example of aggregation” of news content because they included information which Fin24 had sourced.

The court papers were filed on September 2. Fin24 has until the of the month to decide if it wants to defend the case.