Huffington Post bloggers suing the Huffington Post/AOL for portion of the money AOL paid to acquire Huffington Post last year will not be getting a payday, the Guardian reported.
According to the Guardian, a U.S. district court judge dismissed the lawsuit and found that the Huffington Post bloggers knew they wouldn’t be making money from their writing so they couldn’t expect a payment now. The judge, John Koeltl, wrote
“No one forced the plaintiffs to give their work to the Huffington Post for publication and the plaintiffs candidly admit that they did not expect compensation.
“The plaintiffs entered into their transactions with the defendants with full knowledge of the facts and no expectation of compensation other than exposure. In such circumstances, equity and good conscience counsel against retroactively altering the parties’ clear agreements.”
We wrote in February 2011 when the Newspaper Guild started petition for the Huffington Post to pay bloggers. In March 2011, the Newspaper Guild backed Visual Art Source’s call for Huffington Post to create a “pay schedule” for writers and to differentiate between editorial and advertisement.