CBS Sports has blamed a “technical issue” for scraping blogs from various SB Nation team sites and posting them in full on its website with no attribution, according to a statement from CBS Sports Digital to Deadspin.
The confusion began last week and grew today, when SB Nation writers posted on Twitter about the apparent plagiarism. Other Twitter users wondered if SB Nation had some sort of content-sharing deal with CBS Sports.
All, however, is well. According to a source, SB Nation’s MLB league manager Justin Bopp told team site writers and managers that the situation was “dumb and weird,” but that the company’s legal team was aware of it; he further assured them, per the source, that the situation was due to an automated glitch and wasn’t intentional.
The assurance was necessary because team site workers had raised concerns that SB Nation might have sold team site content to CBS without cutting the writers in on the deal, or that outsiders might think SB Nation was selling their content without cutting the writers in on the deal.
Vox Media did not respond to emailed questions about a content-sharing deal or how the SB Nation team site posts ended up on the CBS website. For their part, CBS Sports Digital issued the following statement through a spokeswoman:
When linking out to SB Nation stories through our app, a technical issue caused the stories to be inadvertently posted in their entirety on the site instead. We immediately fixed the issue and are taking steps to ensure this does not happen again.
The CBS spokeswoman did not respond to a followup email asking for specifics on the technical issue.