The Huffington Post Lawsuit.

[CatInASuit]

Recently the high profile leftwing news site Huffington Post was sold to AOL for $315m with the majority of the money going to the two owners of the site.

Now, most of the content was created by bloggers and added for free. They claim that without their content the site would never have been as popular as it was and so would not have been sold on to AOL making the two owners a lot of money in the process.

Because of this, they want a share of the proceeds of the sale for the time and effort, albeit freely and unpaid, they put into the site.

So, do you think they have a case or do the owners deserve the payoff they got for putting the whole framework together?

[What Exit?]

I do not believe they have a case. While on a much grander scale, this is the same to me as any other place were people post content free to a commercial site. What difference this case and when the Straight Dope Message Board was sold to Creative Loafing as part of the overall package?

ETA: This is not to say, that the owners of the Huffington Post might well have a morale obligation to spread a bit of that windfall among the bloggers that generated the content. It would probably be the right thing to do, but I do not see a legal reason to do so.

[Zuul]

I really see no justification for their case. Would sharing the money with them be the ethical thing to do? Certainly, but it's not a requirement by law. By blogging for free they had already agreed to accept no payment for their writing. They have only themselves to blame for the devaluation of their work.

[CatInASuit]

I wonder if this will lead to a lot of bloggers pulling their content from aggregator sites so that this doesn't happen to them. If they did, would it mean that more people would just fill the gap who want to blog.

Personally, I think AOL will be stuffed and have bought a white elephant. Without the free bloggers that made the site what it was, all it has is its name. That name is going to be worth much after the lawsuits and no serious blogger is going to freely write for AOL.

I would expect other freesites to pop up, which have clauses in about what happens in these situtations.

[hobbler]

"no serious blogger" hahaha! What a joke! Oh, you kill me!

[Zuul]

I doubt it. There will always be fewer people paying for writing then there are people willing to write for free. On the one hand, there are the people who understand how to use blogging for self-promotion in order to make money off of projects that are actually profit driven. On the other, there are people who don't understand, but so desperately want to see their names out there that they'll write for free and then feign confusion and disappointment when they don't get money out of it.

When I was first starting out I got pulled into one of those free writing gigs, but I didn't want to give my work away for free so I dropped it. I sacrificed exposure and a better padded portfolio, but I felt it was worth it for me to find work I'd actually get paid for. Not everybody sees it that way--or perhaps they have pie in the sky dreams like these bloggers--and so they will write for free. They end up devaluing the market for everyone who only wants to write for pay, while also lowering publishing standards since getting a mediocre article for free is pretty appealing from a financial perspective. Until people wise up and put money ahead of their egos, there will always be a ready supply of writers giving their work away.

[Rube E. Tewesday]

Dr Johnson:

"No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money."