It's a very reasonable question and one I happen to feel quite strongly about. NewsBiscuit in no way makes any claims to the ownership of the material posted on this site, which remains the intellectual property of the original author.
Every contributor to the book was credited and paid, but my publishers wanted to put my name on the front because it was their charmingly naive belief that this would increase sales (and to be fair, because much of the stuff was from the early days of the site, I had written a large proportion of it anyway).
The shop is there to help pay for the running costs of the site, although frankly we spend more sending Writers of the Month a mug than we earn from that department. At no point has any money gone from Net Loss Ltd to pay myself or other editors or Red who is up late at night doing the pics. However, if NewsBiscuit did become profitable, I think it would be reasonable to pay the people who put in the most time, and if it became really profitable, it would be great if we could pay something to the writers of front pages too. Alas, it doesn't look that we are even close to that at the moment, but who knows what will happen to the internet over the next decade.
Stuff gets copied and pasted from NewsBiscuit and put on other sites, Red's photos go viral without due credit, there was even a English speaking newspaper in Majorca that used to have a humorous column directly lifted from us! Conversely stories have been posted on the NewsBiscuit subs board that were lifted directly from the Onion - the whole area of copyright on the internet is a nightmare, and all we can do is promise not to rip anyone off, and thank all the contributors for continuing to post their stuff for free for others to enjoy.
If we can bring a little happiness into this troubled world, then that will have been enough... For how can you value the sound of a child's laughter on a bank's balance sheet? A smile is priceless, let our humour reach out across the world etc etc (sound of birdsong, violins and contributors weeping builds in background as editor sneaks off to bank with another large bag of cash.)
