Tasini v. Aol, Inc.

851 F.Supp.2d 734 (2012)

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Nature of the Case

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Facts

The Huffington Post launched its www.huffingtonpost.com website as a for-profit enterprise on May 9, 2005. It became popular receiving more than 26 million unique visitors per month. The website provides written by paid staff members, collected from other websites, or submitted by unpaid bloggers who have been elected or recruited to blog for the website. Ps, prospective class members, are the website's unpaid content providers. The majority of these content providers are 'professional or quasi-professional writers.' Ps are all repeat providers, having submitted significant volumes of content over varying periods of time. Ps received no monetary compensation but did the work for exposure - namely, visibility, promotion, and distribution, for themselves and their work. Ds always made clear to Ps from the beginning that they never intended to pay for content from these independent and voluntary content providers. The unpaid submissions are arguably the website's most valuable content, both because of their effect of 'optimizing' the website's ranking in search engines such as Google (thus attracting more viewers to the website) and because they allow The Huffington Post to keep production costs low. D taking advantage of these 'stooges' also naturally encourages the bloggers to promote their own submissions via their social networks such as by sending emails, sharing their posts on Facebook or MySpace, responding to reader comments, and contacting other blogs. D's advertising revenues increase in proportion to the amount of page views a website receives, which in turn is a function of the quality of the content provided, as well as the website's ability to attract visitors either through its own marketing or via the social networks of others. D keeps track of the number of page views of, and thus the revenue generated by, each piece of content (including unpaid submissions) on the website. D keeps this data hidden from Ps so they don’t figure out how much they are worth to the site. AOL (D) purchased D for around $315 million. Ps allege that at least $105 million of the purchase price is properly traceable to the value created by the content provided by Ps. After the purchase, D dramatically increased its volume of stooge content reducing its volume of paid submissions in favor of unpaid submissions. Ps claimed in part in their suit that Ds were unjustly enriched as a result of this practice. Ps seek damages in the form of compensation for the alleged monetary value of their submissions, specifically at least $105 million. Ds moved to dismiss the complaint.