My questions:

1. Youtube positions itself as a service provider and therefore hides behind the DMCA when it runs illegal stuff. The Huffington Post's employees are actively stealing content from other people. Do they have the same protection? They seem to think so: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/terms.html

2. Why haven't they been sued yet?

HuffPo has that safe harbor for "user content" as specified in their ToS. The most obvious thing is the comments on their articles. If I cut/paste a NYTimes article into a comment on their page, they can't be sued for it.

For content that an agent of their's posts, they enjoy no such safe harbor. EDIT: Back when the MPAA was looking for YouTube's records with IP Addresses, people speculated that they'd pour over them to see if Google employees were either uploading or viewing this content since if you have knowledge of infringing content, you are liable.

As for why they haven't been sued, I don't know.

Really bad timing on HuffPo's part; Creative Loafing, which not long ago bought The Reader, is in the midst of a painful bankruptcy.

My thoughts exactly.

Steal from the Times? The WSJ? Ok. They might give you a pass for a while if you send them readers. They don't know what's going on.

Steal from an alt. weekly that's broke as a joke and hustling to stay alive? Poor form.

Wired Picks up the Story, interviews HuffPo Co-Founder who called it "an editorial mistake and says this: "Generally publishers are psyched to have a link."

http://blog.wired.com/business/2008/12/huffpo-slammed.html

Gawker's Take: http://gawker.com/5113964/arianna-huffingtons-scuzzy-copying...