A man who once successfully sued the New York Times for improper use of his freelance work is now targeting the Huffington Post:
Jonathan Tasini is the lead plaintiff in the suit against the news site, which AOL bought for $315 million in February. His suit, which he filed in a New York court Tuesday, seeks $105 million in damages in behalf of bloggers and other Huffington Post writers who submitted work for which they weren’t paid.
His argument, as I understand it, is that Arianna Huffington engaged in "unjust enrichment" by using unpaid bloggers (including Tasini) to create a media property that came to be valued at $315 million—the price AOL paid for HuffPo back in February.
But... If you're a writer, and you've decided to give away your labor for free, you should know that you're not just giving someone else the ability to cash in on your donated words right now. You're also giving someone else the ability to cash in on the aggregate value your donated words may help create in the future.
To put it another way: It seems to me the problem here is that a writer for some reason thought a for-profit media property was a charity, or maybe some sort of slow-motion swap meet, or maybe a benevolent garden that would reward the labor he tossed into it with a bountiful shared harvest down the road.
Here's what it actually was: A business with owners who are not himself.
HuffPo has described this kind of suit as "completely baseless."