Arianna Huffington: Tasini Lawsuit Is ‘Utterly Without Merit’

by Alex Alvarez | 9:54 am, April 14th, 2011

» 6 comments

While the Huffington Post immediately released a response to the lawsuit filed against it by a group of disgruntled bloggers seeking payment – calling the suit “baseless” before having read it – its founder, Arianna Huffington, has now issued a more in-depth criticism of the document.

And, if her kitten jokes are anything to go by, Huffington isn’t terribly worried about the lawsuit:

The lawsuit filed Tuesday by Jonathan Tasini is so utterly without merit, and has been so thoroughly eviscerated in the media — including being ridiculed as the “dumbest lawsuit ever” — I am hesitant to take any time away from aggregating adorable kitten videos to respond.

But the suit touches on so many important issues about the current state of the media, the kittens will have to wait.

First, let’s look at the merits of the case:

There are none.

Then, beyond insinuating that Tasini’s motives may be more opportunistic than noble, Huffington maintains that the main issue at hand here is that absolutely no contract was broken between the Huffington Post and its contributors.

Furthermore, she adds, HuffPost’s “group blog” – to which unpaid, non-staff bloggers contribute – provides a flexible and highly visible platform for exposure. And, besides – the silent majority of Huffington Post bloggers are fine with the way the group blog is set up.

While that all makes a heaping amount of sense, we’re not too sure Huffington’s continued comparison to the free content provided on her site and the free content available on, say, Facebook bolsters her argument:

Free content — shared by people who want to connect, share their passions, and have their opinions heard — fuels much of what appears on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Yelp, Foursquare, TripAdvisor, Flickr, and YouTube. As John Hrvatska, a commenter on the New York Times, wrote of the Tasini suit, “So, does this mean when YouTube was sold to Google that all the people who posted videos on YouTube should have been compensated?” (And Mr. Hrvatska no doubt contributed that original and well-reasoned thought without any expectation he’d be paid for it. He just wanted to weigh in.)

The difference here is that YouTube, Twitter and the like don’t demand quality content, and a review on Yelp, for instance, doesn’t represent Yelp as a company or brand, whereas a Huffington Post blog post does. And privacy settings on sites like Facebook indicate that the purpose of the site isn’t necessarily to provide a wide-ranging platform for self-expression or discussion but, rather, a place to share photos and links with a set number of friends. Following this line of thinking, filing a very public lawsuit is just a way for Tasini to seek further exposure.

It’s a bit like comparing apples to adorable little kittens, really.

h/t Huffington Post

AOL, Arianna Huffington, Blogger, Huffington Post, Jonathan Tasini, lawsuit

http://www.perceptionasreality.blogspot.com/ skoorbekim

As is AOL stock…
More Liberty5

She’s probably correct, but that never stops people from suing. What we have is a bunch of bloggers saw a chance to cash in.
HKGuy

I’m a fulltime freelance writer and I’m reluctantly agreeing with Huffington. Tasini is one of those do-gooders (I mean that in a good way) who is also a major publicity whore who has tried to take his little bit of fame & good works & parlay it into something bigger. Like Norm Whatisface, the ACLU guy who ran for NYC ombudsman, or gay activist fred karger, who’s running for president although he’s never held office.

Fact is, if these bloggers were stupid enough to write for free, more power to Huffington for exploiting their stupidity. They should have heeded the words of Samuel Johnson: Anyone who writes for free is a blockhead.
TeaPartyPatriot

The lunatic-left extremists who spew their hate of America in HuffPo are appropriated paid at ZERO, ZILCH, NADA, ZIP. If they want to get rich and get 1000 times what they’re really worth they should join a public-sector union and stick it to us taxpayers, like the rest of them do.

arianna (aka: HUFF-and-PUFF) helps put the LUNATIC in lunatic-left.

For those that don’t know of her lunatic history, fact is she was once a solid, responsible conservative republican! Then her rich husband divorced her and she couldn’t handle such absolute rejection and so went totally, completely insane and, naturally, sunk down into the DARK SIDE of d-crat socialism.

Clearly, she still is in desperate need of psychological counseling – like most d-crat socialists – to correct her outrageously flawed views of America and Americans and to stop the destructive self-loathing from which she – like all d-crat socialists – suffers.

AOL, RIP – you will soon join M(ore)S(ocialism)from N(itwit)B(iased-socialist)C(lowns) at the bottom of the lamestream socialist media slime pit.
Xarkonul

I tried to post something in The Huffington Post on Thursday, April 14, 2011, but as usual, what I call “The Huffy Don’t Post” censored me. Here is the text of my deleted comment,

“Mr. Tasini may have a weak case from a purely legal standpoint, but sometimes plaintiffs win such cases if others recognize that the defendants have committed serious injustices.

A stronger breach of contract lawsuit against The Huffington Post would involve the website’s unethical “Community and Commenting Guiding Principles,” which claim that “we never censor comments for political or ideological reasons.”

When I used The Huffington Post’s own figures to create my “Joe Averageguy” analogy, which argues that the overall global temperature has leveled off since 1998, The Huffington Post deleted my subsequent comments and later removed my profile, Xarkonul.

I agreed to what I thought was a mutually beneficial contract with The Huffington Post, and I upheld my part of the bargain by providing fact-based content with no threatening and/or abusive language, but The Huffington Post broke its promise not to censor me for my beliefs. At the very least, Arianna Huffington’s website should admit that it censors its ideological opponents.

Peace out,

Xarkonul”

https://sites.google.com/site/xarkonul/

http://www.youtube.com/user/Xarkonul
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