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Lawsuit goes after Arianna Huffington for stealing the idea for a website.

Politico reports:

?Huffington has styled herself as a ?new media? maven and an expert on the effective deployment of news and celebrity on the Internet in the service of political ends,? says the complaint. ?As will be shown at trial, Huffington?s and Lerer?s image with respect to the Huffington Post is founded on false impressions and inaccuracies: They presented the ?new media? ideas and plans of Peter Daou and James Boyce as their own in order to raise money for the website and enhance their image, and breached their promises to work with Peter and James to develop the site together."...

Democrats need ?to develop a dominant position within the Internet,? Daou said during an early meeting about the site, according to the complaint. ?It is a system [for] pushing the message, not just for fundraising,? he allegedly said.

Huffington called the charge of stolen ideas and broken deals ?a completely absurd, ludicrous supposition? from men whom she?d turned down for jobs on the site.

This might be interesting  ? a stark presentation of the Huffington Post's political agenda. But, really, I'm not too impressed with this notion of stealing "the idea" for a business. Was there a contract or a partnership or not? And it's not much of an idea anyway ? a "dominant" website with a political slant. The trick is to do it well and get the traffic. Anyone could try to do it. Huffington did it. Possibly because she picked the right people to work with, and it wasn't Boyce and Daou.

The lawsuit touches on the same legal frontiers of intellectual property and deal-making as did a famous lawsuit Facebook settled in 2008. The success of the suit, which seeks unspecified damages, will hinge on whether Daou and Boyce can prove they had offered ?something more specific than a generalized notion? and that Huffington had agreed to make them part of the deal, said Dan Kornstein, a prominent New York litigator.

What is the "more specific" thing? The complaint says the idea was for "a collective of blogs by notable personalities, non-partisan news aggregation, issue-specific web pages, scoops and exclusives derived from the founders? personal relationships with Democratic Party and media insiders, and online community-building, with the purpose of driving Internet traffic and ?page views? for politically progressive messaging.? I'm not impressed.

Full post as published by Althouse on November 15, 2010 (boomark / email).