If your a journalist, then it does not matter who pays you... they have to give you credit. Second, what constitutes a journalist is VERY liberally interpreted by the courts. If Van can prove he wrote the articles, and that Tom published, payed, or in any way displayed them.... Van wins, pure and simple.
The co-authorship thing gets into a gray area. But even if Van only contributed a small amount to the articles, he is entitled to co-authorship recognition.
It is irrelevant how crappy his articles are, if Tom altered the "by line", he can be sued and likely Van would win. But as someone else pointed out. We are only seeing one side of the story.
Overall, I would say Tom's reputation is not doing so well anyway. THis article thing doesnt help.
My specific gripes with Tom include:
1. Comparing benchmarks with hardware significantly different as to negate the efficacy of the results (wow, that sounded anal didnt it?)
2. His comments on benchmark results often do not reflect what I see in the benchmarks.
EX: Wow the Pentium 4 really ran away with that benchmark
the benchmark would show the P4 winning by 3%. Thats not "running away" , thats a nose ahead
3. ANand routinely beats Tom in news stories. I saw the IDF stuff on Anand at 4:00am. It took Tom to late afternoon to get their stuff up. The headline on Tom's article said "exclusive" look at the Hammer. When even Tom's own pictures showed other people in the room taking pictures of the Hammer. Anands stuff had more pictures( and closer up) and the content was far more imformative than Toms.
4. Toms forums has turned into a sesspool of trolls and whiners. I find the help available here on Anand more helpfull and direct.
***end of rant****