In a post on her own site, Arianna Huffington takes time out from “aggregating adorable kitten videos” to discuss the $105 million lawsuit that Jonathan Tasini is pursuing against the Huffington Post and AOL on behalf of 9,000 unpaid HuffPo writers.
Huffington’s tone is entirely dismissive: “First, let’s look at the merits of the case,” she writes. “There are none.” She goes on to say that no contracts were broken, and sentimentally notes that the group blog is part of her “DNA.”
She chastises Tasini for launching the suit after years of sending thank-you notes to HuffPo for the exposure he was getting from writing for them:
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.
Huffington’s response is a direct message to Tasini, and other unpaid HuffPo writers, that she’s fully entrenched in her belief that there is nothing wrong with using free content to build a profitable online business. Changing her mind, it seems, is going to take more than what some are calling a frivolouslawsuit.
