The debate over whether The Huffington Post, newly enriched following its merger with AOL, should pay its unpaid bloggers has launched an armada of blog posts and a fleet of media roundtables, but today, the stakes will be upped. A group of bloggers has announced that it will file a class-action lawsuit against The Huffington Post, AOL, and Arianna Huffington, who personally pocketed at least $20 million from the $315 million merger.
The lead plaintiff in the suit is a man named Jonathan Tasini, who began blogging for The Huffington Post in December of 2005 and ceased blogging in February of this year, a few days after the merger was announced.
More details TK, but we can only assume that at stake here will be whether The Huffington Post or AOL violated any labor laws in their use of unpaid labor or misled the bloggers as to what they were ultimately entitled to.
Update: The complaint has been filed, and Tasini & co. are asking for a whopping $105 million.
TheHuffingtonPost.com’s continued assertion that it, alone, should be enriched by the valuable content provided by Plaintiff and the Classes has the broad detrimental effect of setting an artificially low price for the valuable digital content created by Plaintiff and the Classes, depressing the market for such content and, over the long term, having a serious depressing effect on the value of intellectual content being created by Plaintiff and the Classes and on the ability of Plaintiff and the Classes to support themselves as creators of high quality, engaging, digital content.
(via Mixed Media)
