Angus Kidman – anguskidman.show

Last week, Nine announced that it was shutting down Lifehacker Australia (along with its sister sites Gizmodo Australia and Kotaku Australia). I was the editor of Lifehacker Australia between 2008 and 2015, so that was sad news for me.

I figured that sometime soon, the site would disappear. But when I checked, I realised that Lifehacker Australia had already deleted me from its history.

In my seven years there, I wrote some 11,000 posts. But if you head to my author page, it just comes up with a “page not found” error.

What’s really insulting is that the articles haven’t all been deleted (though some of the oldest ones have). Instead, they’ve been reassigned to johnsmithus, a completely generic author account. That’s happened even when the article itself makes it completely clear that I’m the author.

There’s not a clear pattern to what’s happened. Work by other Australian staffers have also been reassigned to the johnsmithus author, but some (like my colleague Chris Jager) are still visible.

Adding to the weirdness, my author page is still visible on Gizmodo and Kotaku. In some cases, an article that was republished on Gizmodo (we used to do that quite a bit) correctly show me as the author, while the Lifehacker original has been reassigned.

A few pieces I wrote for Lifehacker Australia also ended up republished on the original US Lifehacker site. There was no formal deal in place to facilitate that, but I was always happy for the US editors to run a piece if they thought it had relevance. And now those articles, on topics such as interpreting statistics or how to get sleep on planes, are the only ones showing my name correctly on a Lifehacker article.

Is that author change on the Australian Lifehacker site legal? Not at all.

Under Australian copyright law, authors have moral rights which include the right of attribution (being identified as the author of a work) and a right against false attribution (not allowing others to be falsely identified as the author of that work).

That right is being comprehensively violated here, but I don’t see much chance of recourse. The odds are good that the site will soon disappear altogether. Lifehacker is now owned by Ziff-Davis, which has shown no interest in running or licensing localised editions of its other titles.

As media newsletter Unmade put it in discussing the closure, “allowing the archives to disappear from the web would be cultural vandalism.” Sadly that vandalism is already very much happening.

About all I can do now is perhaps republish a few of the more notable pieces as part of the Unpublished series here on anguskidman.show, and maybe round up links the way I did for my Mastercheap series.