David Weston Richards is the CEO and Editorial Director of Australian technology publisher 4SquareMedia. He publishes , SmartHouse News, SmartOffice, and ChannelNews. Previous career moves have involved creating a PR company, Weston Communications, as well as a publishing company DWR Communications, later sold to Penton Media.
Controversies and Plagiarism
In one of Richards' stories that received worldwide attention, he claimed that just months before the release of Windows Vista, Microsoft was having to rewrite "up to 60% of Vista's code". The original article has since been taken down by Richards. Blogger Robert Scoble called for Richards' sacking over the piece. Richards later admitted in an email published by MediaConnect proprietor Phil Sim that he had based the whole story on some comments by an Acer Australia Marketing Manager, Raymond Vardenega. Richards commented to Sim that "I don’t need a bunch of upstart bloggers to tell me how to write a story or how to stand a story up." Richards has been accused of plagiarism of other journalists' stories from a variety of sources ranging from newspapers and magazines to wire services and blogs. Journalist Jason Unger notes several instances where that Richards plagiarised Unger's work appearing in CE Pro magazine along with other article from CE Pro, TWICE, Big PictureBig Sound, Residential Systems, Stereophile, BusinessWeek and even The Hollywood Reporter. Richards was profiled by the Australian Broadcasting CorporationMedia Watch on 3 March 2008, under accusation of plagiarism. The video is available for viewing on the . At first, Richards claimed that publishers had given his company permission to use the plagiarized content, but the ABC journalists discovered this was not true. "He has no current authorization from us to use any of our materials", one of the publishers stated. Several hours before the program went to air, Richards published a claiming his website had been hacked, and the hacker had been posting stories under his name using plagiarized content in order to discredit him. However, numerous content owners stated to Media Watch they had contacted Richards over the years to complain about unauthorized reproduction of their content with false information published on 4SquareMedia website, leading ABC Media Watch to award him the "Phantom of the Internet" trophy, a new award devised by the ABC for the most inventive excuse for plagiarism. Richards was profiled by Media Watch again on 5 July 2010, citing reports that IDG was demanding 4Square Media take down content they believed was copied from the PC World website. Despite the controversies, numerous plagiarism accusations have continued to surface against sites associated with Richards and 4Square Media at least as recently as October 2019. Richards was again profiled by Media Watch on 13 February 2017, for plagiarising more than 16 articles in January 2017 from publications including Dow Jones, Forbes, BBC and Quartz. In March 2018 Richards and his company 4Square Media was successfully prosecuted by the Australian Tax Office for failing to pay statutory superannuation payments on behalf of his employees. The ATO was successful in petitioning for the company to be wound up, with Richards settling with the Federal Court at the last minute.
In October 2019 serious questions were asked by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's media watchdog, Media Watch, after it was revealed Richards had plagiarised an article from the Financial Times, about Google's efforts to remove plagiarised news articles from its database.
