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Arianna Huffington is like a “slave owner on a plantation of bloggers,” according to the lead plaintiff in a class action lawsuit that seeks more than $100 million in damages on behalf of 9,000 unpaid bloggers who, he argues, should be paid for helping build the Huffington Post into the valuable media property AOL bought for $315 million.
The lawsuit, led by well-known New York labor activist and Huffington Post blogger Jonathan Tasini, alleges that thousands of writers and other contributors have been wrongly denied any compensation for the value they created for the Huffington Post.
While not an unprecedented legal action, the scale of the alleged infractions — and the high profile of both Huffington and AOL — means that the outcome of this case could set an important standard about the rights of freelancers in the internet age.
“This is about justice,” Tasini told Wired.com by phone Tuesday. “Arianna Huffington is like a slave owner on a plantation of bloggers. The truth is, without the bloggers there was no Huffington Post and there would be no sale to AOL. She has decided to rob all these bloggers of a fair share of this profit-making venture.”
The lawsuit, filed Tuesday in New York federal court (.pdf), seeks at least $105 million in damages on behalf of the Huffington Post’s unpaid writers and other contributors. It names AOL, TheHuffingtonPost.com, Arianna Huffington, and Ken Lerer, the wealthy New York investor who co-founded the website with her, as defendants. They have 21 days to respond to the lawsuit.
In a statement e-mailed to Wired.com, Huffington Post spokesperson Mario Ruiz dismissed the complaint as “wholly without merit.” The lawsuit was first reported by Jeff Bercovici at Forbes.com.
“As we’ve said before, our bloggers use our platform — as well as other unpaid group blogs across the web — to connect and help their work be seen by as many people as possible,” Ruiz said. “It’s the same reason people go on TV shows: to promote their views and ideas. HuffPost bloggers can cross-post their work on other sites, including their own. Aside from our group blog, to which thousands of people from around the world contribute, we operate a journalistic enterprise with hundreds of paid staff editors, writers and reporters.”
AOL and Huffington have laid off more than 200 editorial staffers and freelancers over the last month, including some veteran journalists.
Tasini and his lawyers are pursuing a two-pronged legal strategy, with two separate legal claims. The first is “unjust enrichment” under federal law, and the second is a New York state statutory claim for “deceptive business practices.”
The reason for the two claims is that if the judge throws out one claim, the plaintiffs will still have another claim to fall back on, lead attorney Jesse Strauss of New York law firm Kurzon Strauss told Wired.com by phone Tuesday.
It’s important to note that this is not a breach-of-contract case — it’s not clear what contract, if any, Huffington’s 9,000 unpaid bloggers had with the website — or a copyright case.
Rather, by making an “unjust enrichment” argument, Tasini is alleging that Huffington built her business and reaped tens of millions of dollars off the backs of unpaid labor.
(Disclosure: This author worked at AOL prior to joining Wired.com five months ago, and contributed a few music reviews to the Huffington Post several years ago. He was not paid.)
“TheHuffingtonPost.com has been unjustly enriched by engaging in and continuing to engage in the practice of generating enormous profits by luring carefully vetted contributors, with the prospect of ‘exposure’ (which TheHuffingtonPost.com deceptively fails to verify), to provide valuable content at no cost to TheHuffingtonPost.com, while reaping the entirety of the financial gain derived from such content,” according to the lawsuit.
In a statement, Strauss said that he and his partner Jeffrey Kurzon “intend to prove at trial that the content and services provided by the over 9,000 members of the class created substantial value for the Huffington Post, and we hope to establish a strong precedent that in the digital age content producers must be compensated for the value they create.”
Tasini acknowledged that he never signed a contract with Huffington to write for her website, but said that the lawsuit also functions to make a broader point about journalism in the digital age.
“This is about the future of culture and the future of the ability of creators to make a living,” Tasini said. “And if we don’t keep drawing these lines and fighting these fights, we won’t have a class of creators who can actually make a living.”
This is not the first time that Tasini has taken a stand for the labor rights of writers. He was the lead figure in the landmark and successful case, The New York Times v. Tasini, which affirmed freelancers’ rights in the digital age. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of Tasini and his colleagues in 2001.
And this lawsuit is just one manifestation of outrage against Huffington since she sold her website to struggling internet portal AOL for $315 million.
Separately, the Newspaper Guild, whose members number 26,000 writers and editors nationwide, has called for a strike against Huffington, a labor action spearheaded by Los Angeles publisher Bill Lasarow, who runs Visual Arts Source and ArtScene.
“This is about much more than the HuffPo,” Lasarow told Wired.com by phone Tuesday. “This issue has exposed the fact that the writing and journalism fields have undergone vast changes in recent years that have resulted in a crisis. Part of the crisis is that much of what now passes as professional writing is not. The other half is that many who once made a dignified living as respected professionals no longer are able to do so.”
Tasini et al. v. Huffington et al. Filed Complaint April 12, 2011
