A New York judge has ruled that a lawsuit claiming Arianna Huffington and her business partner stole the idea for the Huffington Post has enough merit to go to trial. Arianna and partner Ken Lerer had asked for a dismissal but the judge ruled that plaintiffs Peter Daou and James Boyce, former staffers at the 2004 Kerry-Edwards campaign, can sue under a New York law that allows people to sue if someone steals an idea, PaidContent says:Daou says he penned a memo about a “new kind of Democratic news-reporting website and blogging ‘ring’ or collective” but that Huffington stole the idea and cut him out of the loop before she launched the Huffington Post in May of 2005.Noted: PaidContent says “the ruling may also increase the pressure on Huffington to settle the case before further details about the origins of her site are put before a jury.”
Add: Make that a double dose of bad legal news for HuffPost. The New York Times threatens to sue unless HuffPost drops the title of its Parentlode blog, saying it rips off NYT’s Motherlode.
