[rayiner]

This is the basic model of a lot of similar companies. Get people to provide content for free, then profit from control over the repository. If it weren't for copyright protections, HuffPo and its ilk would just copy your blog posts verbatim and call it a day. They're one step up from the sites that auto-generate product reviews or display reformatted Wikipedia articles.

[untog]

If it weren't for copyright protections, HuffPo and its ilk would just copy your blog posts verbatim and call it a day.

They pretty much do anyway. Anything saying "CNN has reported..." is basically just a rewrite of the existing CNN article, to just enough of an extent that they avoid copyright issues. Do slightly better SEO (easy because huffingtonpost.com is more popular than cnn.com) and you get all the clicks. The organisation that spent money on the original reporting gets nothing. Yay.

[fuzzywalrus]

I've been kicking around the idea of a plugin for FF or Chrome to root the source out of a few popular reblog sites (HuffPuff, Upworthy etc) as they usually link it.

Rarely do the reblog sites add much other than op-ed commentary to original news item and it'd save me time when someone sends me a link to a news item to root out the source.

[altcognito]

Or link aggregators who get others (for free) to submit links to freely (not always though) provided content.

It's all about the traffic.