Joshua Gross:

Today, TheNextWeb took a little bit of that away from me by basically plagiarizing my post (pic), being sneaky about it, and defending it.

The response by The Next Web is terrible.

What bothers me about this situation is that it’s not an isolated incident — it’s the norm. Writers take the majority of another person’s story, put a link to the original story somewhere at the bottom and call it their own. Worse yet, some sites don’t even link to the original story in the text, they list it after the story as a “Source Link.”

These types of things are only meant to do one thing — keep pageviews for yourself. If the original story is so good you want to use it as the basis for your story, then you need to do two things: 1. Name the publication and link prominently 2. Add something to the story.

Update: TNW’s CEO posted his thoughts on the situation. It’s in a Google Doc and not posted to the Web site, which seems odd to me. I also added some more of my thoughts.