Barter News Weekly

As part of our reporting in the struggle of Eric Wood of Barter Independent against ITEX, a reader sent us the following link, http://www.interstateq.com/archives/3908/, which outlines a web designer’s decent in to copyright infringement and content theft.

In January, an InterstateQ.com report exposed certainly unethical and possibly illegal practices by OutGayLife.com and Moonviper Web Services owner Eric Wood, who had been reposting and republishing news stories, features, blog posts and articles from LGBT publications, blogs and mainstream press and news organizations. At the time, InterstateQ.com found at least 17 separate cases of possible infringement on the copyrights of LGBT publications, blogs and mainstream publications, including the Asheville, N.C.-based Stereotypd, The Advocate, former Washington Blade editor Chris Crain’s blog, The Atlantic, New America Media, BoxTurtleBulletin.com and others…Michael Jones, the lead Gay Rights writer for Change.org, told InterstateQ.com several of his site’s articles had been republished. Jones said Wood did not have permission to republish the stories. Wood also failed to cite the original author or source and failed to link back to the original material.

One of the recent articles on BarterIndependent entitled, “Making a Go of It the Old-Fashioned Way, Through Bartering”, was lifted from a New York Times article published in February, 1993. Mr. Wood makes no distinction between what is self generated content and stolen content, in fact not changing the title of articles when publishing them as his own.

A few to compare for yourself:

http://www.nytimes.com/1993/02/14/nyregion/making-a-go-of-it-the-old-fashioned-way-through-bartering.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&pagewanted=1

http://barterindependent.com/industry-news/making-oldfashioned-bartering

http://www.designtaxi.com/news.php?id=2589

http://barterindependent.com/barter-blog/working-together#utm_source=feed&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=feed

http://www.nytimes.com/1993/02/14/realestate/commercial-property-bartering-real-estate-a-creative-way-to-dump-a-lease.html?pagewanted=all

http://barterindependent.com/innovative-trades/commercial-property-bartering-real-estate-creative-way-dump-lease

Clearly, reposting content from other sources is standard practice among bloggers and news reporting agencies, with certain caveats: link backs and credit to the original source.

Here on the Barter News Weekly, we also seek out content from all over the world to aggregate here to provide the most comprehensive source of barter industry material, but in every article where someone else’s content is used, credit is given to the original source with a link back to the original story.