The Washington Post's Ian Shapira gets today's "unclear on the concept" award - he's upset that someone linked to a story he wrote, and might be making money on their own site (ads):

After all the reporting, it took me about a day to write the 1,500-word piece. How long did it take Gawker to rewrite and republish it, cherry-pick the funniest quotes, sell ads against it and ultimately reap 9,500 (and counting) page views?

So... here's a question for Shapira. Let's jump back to 1990, before the web. Let's say I read some story by him (or a predecessor) back then, and eagerly repeated the salient points to various people I knew - never mentioning the Post specifically, just saying that I had "read it in the paper". Is that lawsuit worthy? Ok, so I'm not making money from it by selling ads. Let's say that I used the story as fodder for a few speaking engagements - is that verboten as well?

With that thought in mind, let's jump back to reality for a minute:

Gawker was the second-biggest referrer of visitors to my story online. (No. 1 was the "Today's Papers" feature on Slate, which is owned by The Post.) Though some readers got their fill of Loehr and never clicked the link to my story, others found their way to my piece only by way of Gawker.

Let's boil Shapira down a bit: "Wahhhhh - they sent me readers I never would have gotten otherwise! They should dry up and blow away!"

The word "tool" comes to mind for some reason...

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