AOL and Huffington Post sued by unpaid bloggers

[bconway]

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/04/12/us-huffington-lawsuit-idUSTRE73B5JT20110412

[johngalt]

"The middle class is teetering on the brink of collapse just as surely as AIG was in the fall of 2009 - only this time, it's not just one giant insurance company (and its banking counterparties) facing disaster, it's tens of millions of hardworking Americans who played by the rules." -A. Huffington

Also see: http://mattbors.com/archives/726.html

[FiddlerClamp]

I believe in being paid for writing, but if they volunteered to write for free, how can they turn around and ask for money now?

[edw]

To call this lawsuit quixotic would be too generous. (And I forget, did Don Quixote ever come off as so whiny?)

[functional-tree]

Second time's the charm! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_Community_Leader_Program

[johnconroy]

It always made me sick that Huffington was making so much coin from unpaid bloggers.

[edw → johnconroy]

Do you feel the same way about any profitable company that runs Apache or FreeBSD? I don't understand your sentiment, which seems quite common. These unpaid bloggers on HuffPo have in aggregate contributed almost nothing of durable value to civilization (and I think I'm being generous, as someone whose politics are not incompatible with your typical HuffPo reader or contributor, in assuming the net contribution has been positive) while the contributions of these developers have been enormous and transformative to our society.

Unpaid bloggers of the world, stop writing! You have nothing to lose but the time you've wasted adding noise to a vapid cacophony.