Arianna Huffington has won a victory in court against Mr. Jonathan Tasini and ‘an estimated 9000 unpaid bloggers’. Read the story here at Thompson Reuters from Westlaw. From Mr. Tasini’s point of view it was right and necessary to bring the legal action, if for no other reason that to give focus to the practice of economic exploitation in the age of the internet, and probably to give Ms. Huffington some well deserved grief. The legal argument makes sense: that the bloggers had made a series of agreements, over time, that their work would be uncompensated, so legally that leaves Ms. Huffington vindicated. Although to engage in some speculation, one might want to share in the good fortune by distributing some stock in AOL, or some other reward to those people who helped build your ‘brand’, as a gesture of good will, or at the least, to indemnify oneself professionally and personally from the public relations disaster that Ms. Huffington’s intransigence wrought. It made her look small, greedy and utterly un-progressive: just another Capitalist. Although one would think that Ms. Huffington’s revered teacher Milton Friedman would have taken the same course. Is it possible to expect a different mode of conduct from a self-proclaimed progressive woman capitalist than from a Free Market male? Or am I engaging in an anachronistic gender bias? Just from the perspective of pragmatism this should have been handled with the adroitness that Ms. Huffington has demonstrated over time on so many other issues. To become proverbial: no need to make 9001 enemies when some careful thought,planning and investment could yield many more steadfast allies. 

Political Cynic