High-profile plagiarism cases are always met with a certain amount of schadenfreude from the media’s chattering classes, as well as calls for the defendant’s head, but the response to BuzzFeed editor Benny Johnson’s serial plagiarism has been especially intense.

There’s a reason for that: In the eyes of many journalists, BuzzFeed is constantly walking a fine line between aggregation, or “curation,” and theft. Go to BuzzFeed.com and click on any one of its lists. In very fine print, buried below each photo, there will be a link to another site — usually Reddit — which is where the photograph came from.

Is this plagiarism? Of course not. Does it feel a little seedy? Yeah, a bit.