The ongoing rivalry between Nikki Finke's Deadline.com and Sharon Waxman's TheWrap.com for the eyes of Hollywood's cognoscenti took a new turn Wednesday as Mail.com Media Corporation, owner of Finke's website, fired off a "cease and desist" notice to TheWrap.com, accusing it of engaging in a "continuous pattern of misappropriating content from Deadline.com." In a separate statement on her website, Finke remarked, "I will not, and can not, allow anyone to rip off Team Deadline's exclusive coverage." Waxman, calling the letter from Finke's attorneys "strangely worded," printed all of it on her site, then commented that while it accuses TheWrap of misappropriating its content, "it gives no examples of TheWrap having done so." Meanwhile, former Los Angeles Times journalist Kevin Roderick, who launched the LAObserved.com website in 2003, commented on the latest Finke-Waxman contretemps "Finke certainly has no claim to purity on this topic -- I've had stuff skimmed off by both her and by Waxman's people through the years without a fair level of attribution, so I can watch this with some amusement."

24/02/2011