For those who don’t know the Huffington Post is perhaps the world’s largest and most influential blog.  For years Arianna Huffington has used her vast wealth and influence to drive traffic to the site.  The Huffington Post uses a mixture of paid writers, celebrities, and freelance writers to generate content for the site.

In April 2011 a suit for $105 million was filed against the Huffington Post by Jonathan Tasini.  Tasini took it upon himself to represent over 9,000 unpaid writers who contributed free content of their own free will.  No contracts were signed, no editorial calendars were created, and no assignments were given to any of the unpaid writers.

None of this mattered to the Mr. Tasini when AOL whipped out the bank book and paid $315 million for the Huffington Post.  Up until now the debate about the lawsuit has been incredibly one sided.  Most people think that Tasini doesn’t have a lawsuit because he (and others like him) chose to work  for free.  Before you jump on that bandwagon consider a few things:

• The Huffington Post generates over 100 articles per day.  Most of which come from free writers.
• Domains that generate high volumes of fresh content on a daily basis rank higher in search engines.
• The vast majority of traffic to the site doesn’t go to articles written by free writers.  However, there are 9000 of them.  9,000 free workers writing content and telling people about your site has to generate a good amount of eyeballs.

So what do you think?  Is the lawsuit frivolous or does it have grounds?

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