Web Comic Writer Trolls Huffington Post For Republishing His Work
If you don’t already know who Matthew Inman is, you should. He’s the hilarious writer and illustrator behind the popular web comic The Oatmeal, and his most recent publication, “Having a baby VS having a cat” is already a viral sensation. Hence why Huffington Post’s UK site decided to re-purpose the entire thing for their comedy website.
“Aggregation” is the name of the game these days. It’s how most online publishing words (like here at Mediaite), and so long as original ideas and content are appropriately attributed and not stolen or copied outright, then everything is fine. Hell, HuffPost wasn’t even the first website to aggregate Inman’s comic — a website called Bored Panda beat them to the punch.
The problem with HuffPost’s aggregation of the comic, however, was that they (1) re-published the entire thing, and (2) simply “hotlinked” every single image. In other words, instead of hosting the images on their own servers, HuffPost linked to each individual panel of the comic. (At least Bored Panda copy and pasted each image to their own server.) Not only did this bog down Inman’s website bandwidth, which he pays for, but it also did nothing for his website traffic.
haha ok problem solved. the joy of hotlinking! https://t.co/D07dxT3HqM pic.twitter.com/9gFJhidXrp
— Matthew Inman (@Oatmeal) October 28, 2015
So Inman did what he does best and changed all of the images that HuffPost had linked to. Instead of the original comic, each panel reproduced a message from Inman and a screenshot of his monthly web-hosting bill. “Please don’t hotlink images,” he said. “It cost me money to host these.”
The day before, when Inman first noticed what HuffPost had done, he bantered about it with actor and social media personality Wil Wheaton.
.@wilw At least they bothered to ask you first! They took this comic of mine this week and published the whole thing https://t.co/D07dxT3HqM — Matthew Inman (@Oatmeal) October 28, 2015
@wilw I actually don’t mind having the comic up there, I was just shocked to see HuffPo treating content the same way 9GAG or FunnyJunk does
— Matthew Inman (@Oatmeal) October 28, 2015
@wilw And they listed @boredpanda as the source (another aggregator site) — Matthew Inman (@Oatmeal) October 28, 2015
HuffPost has since altered the original post with an editor’s note, commenting on their changes and apologizing to Inman.
This article previously featured images from The Oatmeal website without proper attribution. The images have been removed and replaced with a more prominent link to the author’s website. We regret the error.
[h/t Washington Post]
[Image via Matthew Inman/Twitter]
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