Posted on 03/30/2012 4:54:42 PM PDT by jimbo123
A federal judge in New York says that the Huffington Post and its parent company, AOL, don’t have to pay bloggers who provide content for the website.
U.S. District Judge John Koeltl dismissed a lawsuit that bloggers filed last year, saying they were unjustly denied compensation for their work.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
In all fairness if this site was sold to someone, not saying it is up for sale or would be, there would be tens of thousands of man hours from thousands of contributors and posters that made it as valuable as it is.
None of us did so with the express purpose of being paid or rewarded, merely to have a voice in the world with a relatively large audience that none of us would achieve with our own blogs.
I hate to say it but if you’re going to contribute material worth reading and put in the time, effort and research to make it compelling to a site like this or any other forum based website you knew you weren’t going to get paid for doing so and shouldn’t complain if someone eventually profits from your work.
In other news, federal courts upheld a $450 million fine and 8,000 year jail sentence against a college student who recorded a song off the radio. The judge said he was "shocked, appalled and disgusted" at the arrogance of the student's presumption of access merely because the song was broadcast all over the entire planet. RIAA executive held a tearful press conference afterwards, praising the courts preservation of fundamental rights in America.
You're obviously not an intellectual property lawyer.
No I’m not an IP lawyer however none of us have a contract; stated, implied or otherwise that we own (In a commercial sense.) the work we have voluntarily contributed.
If we’re plagiarized? If someone uses our work for their own commercial purposes outside of Free Republic? Yes, I can see how IP law would come into play.
However I’m under no illusion that my contributions to a forum based website are ever going to produce monetary gains for me.
As such, I don’t contribute lengthy, well researched, documented and original pieces very often to any website forum anymore. I already built the cornerstone of a “non-partisan” site with/for a friend of mine and was demoted from administrator. After that fact came about I deleted all of my contributions manually from the site as any user could do. Realizing that his site content lost 20+% of size within 20 minutes he resorted to a saved/backup version of the site, changed my user/screen name and basically stole my writings then subsequently sold the site for a sum I’m wholly unaware of.
I would never again do such original work for any site as exists in this format ever again.
Liberal doofuses who gave freely of their time to ‘contribute’ to the cause now want to be paid! WOW! That seems to violate every capitalist hating vein in their bodies.
Those bloggers can move to another site and Google ads will pay them pennies!!
I think Jim Thompson should pay me out of the Free Republic fundraisers.
Especially considering how long he and everyone else here have been putting up with my crap.
A bunch of socialists suddenly become capitalists. Amazing to see.
I don’t see a problem. If they had produced something of value, rather than the nonsense and stupidity that they puked out, then they might have been entitled some certificates for free Subway sandwiches or something of equal or lesser value. Sounds like a bunch of losers trying to hit the lawsuit lottery.
I guess this generation has met the man... and his name is Arianna Huffington.
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