Dow Jones files lawsuit against Ransquawk

Jason Conti, senior vice president and deputy general counsel and chief compliance officer for Dow Jones & Co., the parent of The Wall Street Journal, posted the following online on Thursday:

We produce scoops, uncover wrongdoing and aim to keep our readers informed on a broad range of topics through the hard work of nearly 2000 Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones journalists around the world.

So it’s no surprise that we refuse to sit back when others swoop in to swipe our content.  Today we filed a lawsuit to hold one such offender accountable:  Real-Time Analysis & News, Ltd.—otherwise known as “Ransquawk”.

Subscribers to Dow Jones’s DJX product pay for a host of benefits, including the earliest access to our unrivaled journalism.  These DJX subscribers get DJ Dominant, a real-time news feed that includes first access to exclusive news and analysis uncovered by our reporters.

Ransquawk runs a web site and “squawk” service that blasts out real-time news relevant to traders and others.  Ransquawk has somehow obtained access to our exclusive feed and is “squawking” out our content, verbatim, within seconds of it being published.  Ransquawk sells both its audio squawks and an accompanying scrolling headline feed to its customers who no doubt have a need for access to timely, potentially market-moving news – exactly the sort of news that Dow Jones’s journalists break every day.

Since Ransquawk doesn’t engage in much newsgathering, they take content from news organizations like ours in order to produce their squawks and headlines.  They’re systematically copying, pasting, and selling our journalists’ work.   They don’t have permission to do this, but from their response to our cease and desist letter, they don’t seem to care.

Read more here.