neel,
As a for-profit corporation, we have the requirement that the articles we purchased have not been published elsewhere, or they won't have much value here to our readers. Additionally, we have a requirement that we retain exclusive publication rights for a short period of time, again, because if the article is published elsewhere, it dilutes the value of said article for us. After that time period, the copyrights to the article are still retained by the original author--he or she can publish them anywhere they wish, or not. The freelance agreement we use is the same one we use for every single author who has ever written for any of the miriad of sites that we own. We're not singling out anyone here at AO--it's just a matter of fact policy that, until now, we haven't had many complaints against.

From what I know, TAZ is not a corporate owned site--they are not in it for profit, and the rules there are substantially different, and that is fine for them. If, however, they got bought out by a publicly traded corporation--I can assure you the rules would change there too.

That said, we're doing what we can, based on suggestions from the members here, to improve the site. So you can either participate and be a part of the solution, as they say, or you can just gripe and, well, NOT be a part of the solution. If you choose to publish at TAZ, no problem--we hope to see you here when you next return.