Someone paid $26,000 for the CU Independent’s old web domain. Now it’s churning out AI garbage while the real student journalists scramble to afford a legal challenge.
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Key Takeaways
- A buyer paid $26K for the CU Independent’s old domain to publish AI spam.
- Student journalists lack the ~$1,500 needed to mount a legal challenge.
- AI-powered identity theft hits smaller newsrooms hardest with no clear remedy.
The University of Colorado Boulder’s student newspaper migrated from cuindependent.com to cuindependent.org in 2024. Staff had lost track of who owned the old domain, which dated back to the 2000s. When they stopped paying WordPress to host it, the site went dark.
Then it came back. In July, the domain resurfaced with the Independent’s name and logo, publishing articles like “How Many Albums Does Drake Have?” and “Professional Movers in North Carolina for a Smooth and Secure Move.”
“I looked at it, and obviously was shocked and horrified,” editor in chief Greta Kerkhoff told the Washington Post’s Daniel Wu.
The copycat’s About page claims it honors “what CU Independent stood for: strong voices, independent thought, and stories that matter.” It’s a brazen identity theft that 21-year-old Kerkhoff has spent her senior year fighting instead of just running a newspaper.
“It really feels so weirdly malicious,” she said.
This isn’t an isolated case. NewsGuard has identified more than 2,000 AI-generated news sites as of October, according to the Post. These content farms use generic newspaper names to appear legitimate. But taking over a real publication’s recently active domain is rare.
“This is like their dream,” NewsGuard senior editor Sofia Rubinson told the Post.
Kerkhoff reported the site to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation’s business fraud unit. They told her the state couldn’t investigate unless she proved the copycat was making money. The domain’s owners are hidden behind a proxy service.
Her only path forward is filing a complaint with ICANN, the nonprofit that manages internet addresses. That costs $1,500, forcing the university-unaffiliated paper to launch a fundraiser.
Attorney Alexandra Bass, representing the Independent, said impersonating news sites has become more common since generative AI went mainstream.
“Generative AI can allow bad actors to produce content at a rapid pace — potentially flooding the web with misinformation, and at times directly regurgitating the works of dedicated journalists,” Bass told the Post.
Student Press Law Center attorney Jonathan Gaston-Falk said this could become standard for student and local newsrooms that can’t match big publishers’ legal resources.
“It’s frustrating because I think that a lot of these acts … are premised on the idea that student journalism somehow isn’t protected in the same way as professional media happens to be,” he said.
The copycat site has since changed its logo and removed links to the real Independent’s social media but it has kept the name and continues publishing.
