Huffington hits back at “pile of bile” lawsuit
Arianna Huffington, co-founder of the Huffington post, has reacted with scorn to a legal bid by a group of disaffected bloggers to claim a slice of her recent $315m AOL payout.
Describing the suit as a “pile of bile” Huffington lambasted claims made by freelance journalist Jonathan Tasini that the Post’s bloggers had been “turned into modern day slaves on Arianna Huffingtons’s plantation.”
Huffington retorted: “Without a shadow of a doubt (legal or otherwise), Tasini understood and appreciated the value of having a post on HuffPost -- and was only too happy to use our platform's ability to get his work seen by a wider audience and raise his profile when he was running for office. Until, years later, when he suddenly decided that he'd changed his mind... and that instead of providing a boost to his career and political aspirations, posting on our site was actually just like being a slave on a plantation (I wonder if slaves ever sent thank-you treats to their masters).
“It seems that AOL's purchase of HuffPost suddenly opened his eyes to the fact that we are a business. I guess he'd missed the ads that appeared on the same page as his blog posts the 216 times he decided, of his own free will, to post something on our site.”
The claimants believe that 9,000 unpaid bloggers are entitled to divvy out $105m of Huffingtons fortune between themselves as they believe a third of the sites value could be attributed to their work.
Huffington added: “The key point that the lawsuit completely ignores (or perhaps fails to understand) is how new media, new technologies, and the linked economy have changed the game, enabling millions of people to shift their focus from passive observation to active participation -- from couch potato to self-expression. Writing blogs, sending tweets, updating your Facebook page, editing photos, uploading videos, and making music are options made possible by new technologies.”