Advertising Age writer, Simon Dumenco, aka: The Media Guy, bitch-slapped AOL’s The Huffington Post for stealing data from his story, then providing a “disingenuous link” to his June post titled, “Poor Steve Jobs Had to Go Head to Head With Weinergate . . .”

It seems The Huffington Post picked the story up, cherrypicked the best data and wrapped it up with a flaccid, “See more stats from Ad Age here” link.

THP has thrived by “aggregating” and “curating” content from real publications with real reporters, real editors and real overhead. The New York Times‘ Bill Keller calls it piracy. Here in Fort Worth, we have another word for “aggregating” and “curating.” It’s called rustling and Arianna has assembled an impressive herd since launching THP a few years ago.

When accused of piracy/theft/plagiarism/rustling, etc., Huffington’s defense is that THP’s link drives traffic to the offended sites. It’s this point that Dumenco disputes and disproves with Google Analytics numbers.

The numbers, unlike Huffington, don’t lie.

Read the entire Dumenco story to see The Huffington Post‘s apology for getting caught.

Stealing from an artist is nasty. But when an artist steals from another artist, that’s reprehensible. It seems that Rihanna is being accused of stealing from a 19-year-old Parisian fashion photographer, Philipp Paulus.

Check out the story on the Photo District News website.

My favorite quote from Paulus: “Why a worldwide celebrity is not able to afford a creative director…is incomprehensible to me.”

“Appropriationist” Richard Prince is back in court. This time he’s being sued for copyright infringement in New York District Court by French photographer, Patrick Cariou, for having lifted photographs from his book, “Yes Rasta.”

This Wall Street Journal article gets at what constitutes “transformative” — the use of an original to create another work in a different medium.

As Daniel Grant’s story points out, the law is gray, particularly in light of the ease with which images can be copied and/or downloaded from the Internet.

Here’s an interesting story from the Dec. 6, 2007 edition of The New York Times about “artist” Richard Prince’s photographs of other photographs, which smells like theft to me, or at the very least, an absolute lack of any original creativity.

This image, shot by photographer
Jim Krantz, was re-photographed by
“artist” Richard Prince.

I’m dumbfounded by Prince’s blatant theft but I’m astonished that a collector would pay $1.2 million for a copy.

Photographer Jim Krantz erred by selling his copyright to Marlboro, which means he owns no rights to the images and therefore, has no right to file suit. That has to smart.

See the New York Times slide show depicting more of Prince’s expropriated “art”.

And you thought image tampering came about with the advent of Adobe Photoshop?

Quite the contrary–it’s as old as photography itself. While digital imaging software has certainly made tampering easier and more accessible, the practice of altering photographs was alive and well in photographer Mathew Brady’s time.

Here at top is a photo of General Ulysses S. Grant and his generals, well almost. General Blair, at far right, was added later (bottom photo). Notice too how the background changes and the table or pedestal at far left in the foreground disappears in the bottom photo.

This excellent research paper from Dartmouth’s Image Science Group provides multiple examples and demonstrates that deception in photography was alive and well 142 years ago.

While photography is less than 200 years old, deception is eternal.