You may have seen a few reports about the class-action suit brought against the Huffington Post after it was acquired by AOL for $315 million. It was filed by Jonathan Tasini, who calculated the content created by volunteers should be valued at a third of the sale value, $105 million. There’s been a fair bit of commentary on the case, which seems to hinge on a moral obligation rather than a legal one for the Huffington Post (here, here, and here), as it concentrates on ‘Unjust Enrichment‘ , and it will probably hinge on whether the payment in exposure etc is a fair trade for the work involved in creating articles.
Personally I have no problem with sites soliciting, accepting and publishing content supplied for free by volunteers who know the terms of the deal upfront in a clear fashion (i.e. no hiding behind 20 pages of legalese that they no longer have rights to their work – spell it out and then link to the legalese terms!)
The argument that many paid writers make is that this devalues their profession, which is a disruption being felt across various specialisms, whether it’s creative, technical or manufacturers competing in a global market. And as someone who writes for at least part of his living, I agree that the rates for writing have dropped, but it’s down to the writer to decide what will benefit them best, and how to differentiate themselves and maximise what they can earn.
But what will the legal case do?
As someone without a legal education, but with an understanding of the legal departments of large media companies, I can’t imagine the legal case will result in any significant financial reward for Tasini.
But what probably will happen is that most publishers will revisit their terms and conditions for user-generated content and tighten them up even further in any possible way to preclude similar actions. So if you want to submit something for a major site, you’ll spend the first few hours electronically signing your rights away – and it might end up limiting any existing possibilities of rewarding UGC as that could end up muddying the waters between just and unjust enrichment. I suspect the legal view will be that to offer any amount of financial reward would be riskier than none at all.
It might also lead to complications for smaller sites – if they’re accepting content without the ability to offer large amounts of proven exposure, do they then end up falling foul of ‘unjust enrichment’? Do sites need to start publishing their monthly user figures to everything who might send in a guest post?
It seems to that rather than furthering the cause of quality writing (which is more affected by the likes of Google’s Panda search update than by hitting out at the HuffPo), this could just end up limiting the outlets which are interested in accepting user content, and that lack of competition makes it even less likely that rates would rise for those willing to pay.
So have you submitted content for free anywhere? And do you feel like you were rewarded with enough exposure/other benefits?