News Corp Has Threatened To Sue The Daily Mail AU. This Could Get Interesting.

It’s tabloid versus tabloid and black kettles everywhere this week, after News Corp threatened legal action against the Daily Mail Australia yesterday, for “breaching our copyright by lifting substantial slabs of original content from a large number of articles from our mastheads.”

News Corp took time out from vilifying ferals and scroungers just long enough to send a threatening letter that reportedly cited 10 instances in which the Mail had lifted story ideas from them. The timing of the letter was rather bold — some would say breathtakingly hypocritical — given that, as The Guardian claims, News.com.au ran unattributed quotes from the Daily Mail Australia’s exclusive interview with Jamie Gao’s kidnapping victim in late May. Say it ain’t so.

When Guardian Australia became the first new major player in Australian news media since time immemorial last year, a lot of people predicted that shit might get real. But when the Daily Mail followed suit in January, the shit-getting-real looked inevitable. Both papers have carved out significant niches in the hyper-competitive British newpaper market; Australia’s News/Fairfax duopoly, on the other hand, have enjoyed a cosy yin/yang existence since forever, and had very good cause to be concerned at the new arrivals. After a weird phony war, it seems that outright hostilities have commenced. Expect more of this sort of thing.

The Guardian couldn’t really be bothered hiding their glee as the two tabloid titans teetered towards a tedious legal tiff. News got it the worst, with Guardian‘s Amanda Meade pointing out that one of the pieces allegedly stolen by the Mail was a feature about “‘the best dress a woman can own‘, which reportedly took six Daily Telegraph journalists, including a fashion editor with 20 years’ experience, to produce.”

Meade, on an almighty roll at this point, then decided to sling Fairfax into the muck, accusing them also of failing to follow proper online attribution protocol, i.e. an acknowledgement and a link back to the source.

Interestingly, Fairfax have resisted the urge to poke the combatants with some kind of ridicule stick, perhaps believing that it’s best not to distract them while they set about tearing each other apart. Then again, maybe they think that news organisations shouldn’t expend their finite resources covering industry gossip — those ‘pre-crastination‘ pieces don’t write themselves, you know…

In other news, world is fukt.

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Update: This first incarnation of this piece incorrectly referred to News Corp as News.com, a mistake which is ironic in so many ways we can’t even.