Arianna Huffington: Slave Owner or Crowdsourcing Pioneer?

A blogger's class-action lawsuit against The Huffington Post claims the site is guilty of "unjust enrichment" for profiting from the labor of others

By Mathew Ingram

When AOL bought The Huffington Post for $315 million, some saw it as a validation of the Web 2.0 model of new media: aggregation, curation, and providing a platform for bloggers, many of whom donated their services in return for the attention of readers.Others, however, seem to feel that founder Arianna Huffington owes those unpaid writers something for her success, and now one blogger has put that idea to the test with a class-action lawsuit that claims The Huffington Post is guilty of "unjust enrichment" for profiting from the labor of others. Web 2.0 has grown up, it seems, and decided to call in the lawyers.

The blogger behind the lawsuit, Jonathan Tasini, is no stranger to this kind of legal battle. He was also involved in a landmark suit against The New York Times a decade ago, in which a group of freelance writers argued publishers were using their work illegally by distributing it online and through various electronic services. The argument in that case was that writers had been paid freelance rates, but they had only given up their rights for print publication, not electronic publication. The case was settled for $18 million in 2001.

Tasini also happens to be a union leader, and he is dragging out every piece of classic union lingo he can muster in defense of his class-action claim. "In my view, the Huffington Post's bloggers have essentially been turned into modern-day slaves on Arianna Huffington's plantation," he told Forbes magazine. Tasini vowed to picket the founder's home and make her life "a living hell," and said that "anybody blogging for the Huffington Post now is a scab" and a "strike breaker."

More Strike Talk

Tasini—who wrote sporadically for Huffington Post for the past several years, knowing he wouldn't be compensated—isn't the only one to pull out the strike talk. The Newspaper Guild endorsed the idea of a strike against the site shortly after it was acquired by AOL (AOL), saying "working for free does not benefit workers and undermines quality journalism," and that writers were being asked to "honor this electronic picket line."

Tasini admits that his lawsuit isn't about The Huffington Post breaching any contract with writers, since the freelance writers and bloggers who worked for the site didn't have a contract, and most apparently understood they would never be compensated other than in pageviews.But he argues the huge sums that the company made by selling itself to AOL justify paying writers something anyway—as much as $100 million. In effect, he and others are saying The Huffington Post may not have a legal duty to pay them, but there is some kind of moral obligation to do so.