Huffington Post is being sued. Arianna made a fortune on the AOL deal earlier this year, and the writers who produced free content for her want a chunk of her payoff. According to the New York Times,
The suit seeks at least $105 million in damages for more than 9,000 writers.
The case raises significant unsettled questions about the rights of writers in the digital age and, at the very least, promises to offer a palette of colorful characters on each side.
Even thought the plaintiff don't have a shot at winning, I think this case is interesting for a lot of reasons. There are some colorful characters involved. We might have to stick our big toe in the murky waters of unpaid content on the Internet, and the dangerous trend towards unpaid work in general. No more free editing of Wikipedia pages, no more adjunct work, no more unpaid interns at law firms.
Apt. 11d 
Law firms have unpaid interns?
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wikipedia seems quite unlike the other things you mention, or so I’d hope. Does anyone edit a wikipedia page thinking it will lead to a job? If so, they are probably not qualified for most jobs. And who does it exploit? No one, as far as I can tell.
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Adjuncts aren’t paid?
My dad is working with a math adjunct who is adjuncting for free, but the math adjunct is in poor health, on disability and probably nearly retirement age, anyway. There was another adjunct on disability who was also working for free, but unfortunately she died recently. Interestingly, the net effect of all of this working for free is that the college has more money available to pay my dad.
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I should mention that aside from the two surviving math adjuncts (my dad and his volunteer colleague), there is probably nobody else in town both qualified and available to teach the remedial math courses that obstruct students’ path to getting a 2-year degree. So, nobody’s having the bread taken out of their mouth by the volunteer adjunct. Before his health deteriorated, he was the wonderful Mr. S, my high school trig/college algebra and chemistry teacher. He gets around in a scooter these days and his mobility issues mean that he isn’t able to stand up and use the chalkboard properly.
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yeah, law firms are now hiring unpaid law firms.
Re: wikipedia. I just read an article talking about dark side of crowd sourcing like wikipedia and, well, blogs. The article argued that we are doing too much work for free and are devaluing the work of paid editors and writers. It was a persuasive article. I thought I linked to it here. Or maybe it was on twitter.
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The article argued that we are doing too much work for free and are devaluing the work of paid editors and writers.
My impression is that people who edit wikipedia pages do so because they enjoy it. (The times I’ve done so have been because of that reason.) And, if people do this because they enjoy it, why shouldn’t they, even if it cuts into the profits of, say, encyclopedia companies. This is like arguing that you shouldn’t cook at him if you enjoy doing so because it cuts into the profits of restaurants. I can see what restaurants might think that, but for people who enjoy cooking it’s a crazy idea. If changes in the world make it harder for people to make money as writers, that’s too bad for people who want to make money as writers, but it’s no more inherently bad then that the development of appliances made it hard for people to make money by doing house-hold chores like cooking or doing the laundry.
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Did AOL really think that all the Huffington Post crew would keep working for free after AOL bought it for $315 million? If so, that wasn’t very bright.
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My impression is that people who edit wikipedia pages do so because they enjoy it.
Doesn’t the same go for most HuffPo writers? Tasini has a blog in which he could rant about whatever he wanted, which I’m guessing he enjoyed, and he was rewarded with more traffic than he would have received going it along with a livejournal account…
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The ‘information wants to be free’ line does seem to have a corollary: hard to get paid for generating it.
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I get paid for generating information that is given away free*, but we make up for it by writing very, very dull prose that is hard to follow.
*assuming you have access to a good library.
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Yes, I don’t think that Tasini has a case here. He wasn’t duped. She never promised him money for blogging; he did it willingly. I do think that people should not work for other people for free, even if they enjoy that work, if that work makes another person wealthy.
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laura — you work for us for free! you write and entertain, and we get to blow smoke on your comment page. Aren’t you providing free entertainment to us?
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yes.
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The case will be interesting to follow, for a few reasons. They’re not making a statutory claim here, but rather one of unjust enrichment. Huffington et al ended up profiting handsomely from the unpaid labor of others; it’s not accidental that the suit came after a $315 million payout. I have no idea what the precedents are for this sort of thing, but I’m guessing there will be a hard look at the value created by the free bloggers versus the site’s other content.
The other question is what it will do to Huffington’s liberal cred—something her “brand” depends on. The focus on this is not going to be good for Huffington or for AOL’s investment. People get really annoyed by this kind of hypocrisy. The last time HuffPo was sued in a labor dispute (by volunteer moderators who realized belatedly that they were workers), the company settled for $15 million.
Not sure whether Tasini’s previous suit against the NYT was considered as much of a long shot, but I seem to recall that it was thought questionable by many. (Disclaimer: I know Tasini, though haven’t talked to him about the suit.)
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Actually, I’m collecting all of your e-mail addresses and sending them to a certain Nigerian prince. You’ll be hearing from him soon.
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Anyone who agreed to work for Arianna Huffington for free without noticing the air of fraudulence and opportunism wafting off of her deserves exactly what they get. They’re not smart enough to have opinions worth paying for.
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“Actually, I’m collecting all of your e-mail addresses and sending them to a certain Nigerian prince. You’ll be hearing from him soon. ”
Hah, so it was you. Now can I sue you for the Nigerian whatevers 6,000,0000,000 that I lost?
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I think Tasini is hoping to shame her. Well, and publicizing the money involved might creating a bit more discontent so that blogger won’t continue to provide free content to, now, AOL. And, it might ’cause a few people to reconsider contributing freely to a for-profit enterprise that doesn’t seem valuable at the moment, but might be sold for mucho bucks.
I heard discussion on this topic at Dawn’s “This Woman’s Work,” too. The conventional wisdom has been that consumers just aren’t willing to pay for content (i.e. Dave’s corollary of “information wants to be free.”). But, I think there’s an alternative hypothesis worth exploring: that others are skimming off most of the value of content provision. Google’s entire business model is based on the content provided by others. BlogHer, too.
Dawn recently dropped out of the BlogHer ad network, because she decided that the compensation she was getting (compared to the value she thought BlogHer might be generating) wasn’t worth it. She doesn’t loose any readers/interest by *not* having BlogHer ads and didn’t think she was getting anything else of intangible value. And the tangible compensation wasn’t worth it.
As more folks make that kind of decision, content collators (like HufPost & BlogHer & others) may need to reconsider their business model. I don’t know if the solution will be good for the consumer, but it may result in a more equitable distribution of value.
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PS: My guess is that Tanesi’s suit has absolutely no legal merit. But, I think that the discussion we’re having was probably a worthwhile reason to file the suit, regardless of the outcome (and, as a potential class action, it’s probably not costing Tanesi anything).
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Althouse featured the following snippet from Eugene Volokh, commenting on the case:
“And of course I run a veritable forced labor camp here, where the authors of our million comments are (doubtless to their shock and horror) entirely unpaid, even though they drive up our page views and thus our income stream. And remember: Every comment you write in response to this post is just further oppression of you. Have you no self-respect?”
http://volokh.com/2011/04/12/commenters-please-dont-sue-us-for-shamelessly-exploiting-you/
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What, Laura isn’t paying you, Amy? Your agent must not be nearly as good as mine.
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bj,
So that explains why you do a lot of very short comments…MH, too, now that I think of it.
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Free labor is problematic, particularly when it’s done with the carrot of fame and fortune and a real job later on being waved in front of the laborer. On the other hand, I think it is helpful to have an idea of what activities you like enough or believe to be important enough that you would be willing to perform them without pay.
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I actually get paid by the word, which is why I post fewer, very long comments.
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It’s one thing to write for free in an organization where no one gets paid, or one person who runs the blog full time gets paid and manages a rotating group of regular or guest bloggers, and another thing to be creating 100s of millions of dollars for an already wealthy woman. I get the impression many blogs run on a non-profit model: i.e. we expect you to do work for free or for very little, because there simply isn’t more money. In that case, bloggers are willing to put in the effort because they enjoy it/think it’s a worthy cause. It’s another thing to work for free in a business model, where a person is basically building up a brand until they can sell it off for a handsome profit. In that sort of situation, the bloggers should have, at the beginning, agreed to work for free but in the off chance the site would be sold at a profit, they would get X% of the profits. That’s a shared risk/shared reward model similar to start-ups paying in stock options.
Finally, I’m not sure how wikipedia is comparable. Yes, it is built on free labor, but it’s the collaborative labor of millions all taking part in an altruistic project (compiling the most extensive encyclopedia of human knowledge). While there might be wikipedia fanatics, wikipedia relies on very small contributions the many, rather than extensive contributions from the few. Also, wikipedia contributors are anonymous, and individually they are not producing a highly profitable product, the way a popular blogger at Huffpost might. Finally, I imagine if the wikipedia founder sold it off for 10s of billions people might get annoyed, but, again, as it stands now the goal of wikipedia is altruistic, not profit driven, and the staff who is paid does stuff like managing the website, stuff people don’t and probably shouldn’t do for free.
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