“Someone is going to sue the Huffington Post” said Joshua Benton, director of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University. “It’s not just about the volume of the content that it appropriates, it’s about the value.” Since March when that article ran in Time magazine, Benton’s position on “distributive journalism” has been a subject of great debate online (and in our office! Our own author Gary Vaynerchuk takes on the subject in his book Crush It!). Today the Nieman Lab points to UCLA IP Law Professor Doug Lichtman’s podcast on fair use in which he interviews NYT General Counsel Ken Richieri. Diverging from other large media companies in his assessment, Richieri concludes that aggregation may constitute “unfair competition” but it really isn’t about copyright:

I mean, I think the big issue online and the pressure publishers are feeling is that publishers online are having a hard time replicating the economics that they saw offline. And many of them are looking at that through the lens of copyright…. I think where I would just draw a distinction is I am not so sure that copyright is really the culprit in a lot of this…that that’s an imperfect lens and an imperfect remedy.

Listen to the podcast here.