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Apparently Duncan Riley from Inquisitr has caught ZDNet Australia red handed for stealing a story from them and than posting it on their site without a mention and reference to the original source of the story which happened to be Inquisitr. Its amazing to see the stomach that the folks at ZDNet have when they come up with such an argument to defend what they did. See their response to Inquisitr below:

Firstly let me say that I completely understand your concerns. Thanks for your email, and I hope everything is well at the Inquisitr.

I respect what the Inquisitr is doing as an independent Australian media organisation, and what you are personally doing as a leading light of new media internationally and in this country.

The article you were referring to was written by Alex Serpo, one of our in-house journalists, and edited by myself.

Firstly, let me say that I think this email exchange illustrates the fact that there are different points of view on this sort of issue from different media organisations.

When a story breaks elsewhere, that ZDNet.com.au wants to have on its site, we attempt to find primary sources (eg, a press release, or calling people up for info), and write our own article.

We don’t usually refer to or use material from other media organisations as we have no way to verify whether their information is correct (and they may have left something out).

Given we are part of CBS, and our articles are re-published worldwide, for us to take any other approach would be inappropriate.

We don’t generally link back to whoever has broken a story first. I am aware that this is a standard technique in the blogosphere, but we don’t follow it here as per current editorial guidelines.

The response is full of words but empty of morality. What they are trying to say is that we could take stories from other small sites because we are ZDNET, a property of the great CBS.

Startup Meme also covered this very news, see the difference yourself.