Daily Mail Australia has countered accusations of plagiarism by News Corp by claiming that its Australian rivals lift stories, photographs and videos without proper attribution or links.



In a strongly worded press release, the Daily Mail defended its journalism and its practice of aggregating stories from other publications.

The British media company’s response comes a week after News Corp’s Australian arm threatened to sue it for breach of copyright.

“Rupert Murdoch is a brilliant, buccaneering innovator who built a global media empire by challenging old business models and vested interests,” a spokesman for Daily Mail Australia said on Sunday.

“How sad that the King Canutes now running his Australian print operation are so unfamiliar with how the modern digital world works.”

In one of 10 examples of alleged “lifting”, the British Daily Mail said the Daily Telegraph and news.com.au had failed to give a link to the US Daily Mail’s exclusive video of members of the boy band One Direction smoking cannabis.

“When carrying MailOnline or Daily Mail material we have discovered that News Corp often neglect to name their source and, even when they do, they most often don’t provide a link back to the original story,” a spokesman said.

Last Monday, News Corp revealed in the Australian newspaper that it was taking legal action against the Daily Mail and accused its journalists of being “copy snatchers and parasites”.

On Sunday, the Mail said News Corp’s actions were “preposterous” and a cynical attempt to damage the MailOnline's reputation.

The Daily Telegraph’s editor, Paul Whittaker, told the Australian that the Mail had come to Australia promising to hire dozens of established journalists. Instead it had taken on young reporters and forced them to “work on a production line of copycats”.

The Mail said it was “proud to have created over 50 new Australian reporting jobs” and gave examples of stories that its “hard-working” journalists had broken.

“At the Daily Mail Australia we aim to break news stories each day and have already begun to do so,” a spokesman said.

“However, like all news media – in particular the giant American digital news aggregation sites – we also follow up on the stories of the day that have been covered elsewhere.

“At MailOnline we pride ourselves that when we tackle a story in the public domain, we always try to add some new piece of information, pictures or video.”

The Nielsen rankings for news websites show news.com.au is the top-ranking site, with an audience of 3.67m. Daily Mail Australia was in sixth place with a 2.18m-strong audience.

The Daily Mail Australia said in its Sunday statement that its lawyers would seek urgent assurances from News Corp that it would refrain from “lifting” material from MailOnline without proper attribution or internet linking.

“DMA will be contacting News Corp after discovering repeated examples of stories and pictures being taken from MailOnline in recent weeks, without proper attribution or internet linking.”

A News Corp Australia spokesman said: "We stand by the fact that we believe the Daily Mail Australia is breaching our copyright by lifting substantial slabs of original content from a large number of articles from our mastheads."