After Huffington Post was sold to AOL for $315 million, there was a really, really silly discussion among a small group of the volunteers who blogged on the site for free (again, voluntarily), who whined about how this was somehow unfair. They ignored the fact that they took none of the risk, spent none of the money, had no obligations to provide content and clearly agreed to receive no money for their actions -- but still, they whined. Some then went even further and filed a very silly lawsuit, led by Jonathan Tasini. Tasini, previously, had successfully sued the NY Times concerning that company's handling of freelance works. Of course, given that he's now sued two major publications which he freelanced for, what publication would ever allow him to write freelance pieces again? It seemed that his success in the NYT suit led him to be over confident with this lawsuit. There was simply no basis for it: he blogged on the site voluntarily, knowing that he'd receive no compensation for it. To then whine that the investors, who took all the risk, made some money selling the site when he had no equity stake in the site, isn't just sour grapes, it's legally ridiculous.

Thankfully, the district court smacked the case down pretty hard, and did so with prejudice, denying him the ability to refile an amended complaint. However, Tasini wasn't ready to give up, and appealed the original ruling. The appeals court has now taken its turn in smacking down the lawsuit, noting that Tasini's argument is simply ridiculous, as you can see in the full filing (also embedded below):

The problem with plaintiffs' argument is that it has no basis in their Amended Complaint. Nowhere in the Amended Complaint do plaintiffs allege that The Huffington Post represented that their work was purely for public service or that The Huffington Post would not subsequently be sold to another company. To the contrary, plaintiffs were perfectly aware that The Huffington Post was a forprofit enterprise, which derived revenues from their submissions through advertising. Perhaps most importantly, at all times prior to the merger when they submitted their work to The Huffington Post, plaintiffs understood that they would receive compensation only in the form of exposure and promotion. Indeed, these arrangements have never changed.

Though it is no doubt a great disappointment to find that The Huffington Post did not live up to the ideals plaintiffs ascribed to it, plaintiffs have made no factual allegations that, if taken as true, would permit the inference that The Huffington Post deceived the plaintiffs or otherwise received a benefit at the expense of the plaintiffs such that equity and good conscience require restitution.

In other words, Tasini's inability to accept the deal he made, and the fact that he apparently got jealous of Huffington's ability to sell the site, is not a legal issue at all. The court also re-affirms that the dismissal with prejudice was entirely proper. Maybe, instead of spending all this time on lawsuits, Tasini would be better served trying to build his own site. Of course, as was ironically noted after he filed his lawsuit, Tasini actually did that once and didn't pay the bloggers who blogged for him...

Swizz Beatz, one of the most well-known, well-respected music producers around -- who was very briefly listed as the CEO of Megaupload right before it was shut down by the US government -- was just interviewed on MTV about Megaupload, technology, file sharing and music and made a bunch of good points. When asked why the industry has been so slow to adopt what technology enables, and specifically about file sharing, which the interviewer notes is "so important in hip hop," he sums it up simply: it's all about greed by the labels.

I think the only reason why people wouldn't embrace technology is because of greed. And because of the old way of doing business, which is also greed. And then you have people running the business -- no disrespect -- that's 80 years plus. They don't even know how to operate an iPad, and they're making decisions on the younger generation's future.

And my association with forward thinking technology is very deep. And it came up a little bit with Megaupload -- which still, today, is a big misunderstanding of technology. And the day that you mix the old business with the new technology, we'll have a better place. It's actually going to be a time when artists can come out and do 10 million records their first week. Because the technology is going to be so locked in tight globally. You have billions of people, all over the world. Why can't artists that everybody likes do 10 million a week? It's just that the communication and the technology and the old way of doing business is off. But once that catches up, which is going to happen in the next three years, it's going to be amazing.

And the cool thing is that technology equals freedom for the artist. And that's the best thing that could ever happen for artists that work hard and that really want to get their career off the ground.

He's then asked a bit about "piracy" and actually getting people to buy, and he notes that if you make good music, people will support you. He says the problem is that people have gotten away from making good music. But when there is good music, people want to support "great music." He notes that people have no problem paying for those "timeless pieces," because they know they're supporting the artists. It's just that when musicians today are "bluffing," the public knows it, and isn't so interested in supporting it.

It's a good interview, and it's good to see more people -- especially in the hip hop world -- speaking out about this, rather than merely accepting the lines from the 80 year old execs at the music labels.

Update: Apparently, Swizz is feeling talkative these days. He also did a nice longer interview on a radio show where he talks a bit more about all of this, again saying that the Megaupload situation was a misunderstanding -- and talked about how he had figured out a way for musicians to make "wow money" but it won't happen now because of the "miscommunication" that has the US government making it look like they were breaking the law.

Last week I wrote about the anti-twitter proclamations of Baroness Susan Greenfield, which I found ridiculous, to say the least. There was some debate in the comments about whether technology can be inherently good or bad, and whether it is just as naive to blindly accept technology as to blindly reject it. This is an important topic and it deserves more attention and discussion.

TechCrunch columnist Paul Carr recently mused about the overall moral ramifications of Web 2.0, the tech startup game and SEO-driven media. On one hand, I think the column is an excellent example of the right way to criticize technology: by focusing on how people use it, not on the technology itself. But the problem is that once you think that through, you realize there is very little in his observations that is new or unique to the web.

At first, Web 2.0 seemed like a perfect two-way street. Brilliant entrepreneurs who genuinely wanted to change the world built services that we all wanted to use. They became rich, and our lives became better connected. We were all in it together.

Fast forward just a handful of years, though, and something has gone very, very wrong with that particular social contract. We users have kept our side of the bargain — dutifully tagging our friends in artificially-aged photos, and checking in at bars, and writing reviews of restaurants. We’ve canceled our newspaper subscriptions, and instead spend our days clicking on slideshows of “celebrities who look like their cats” or obsessively tracking trending topics on Twitter. We’ve stopped buying books published by professional houses and instead reward authors who write, edit and distribute their own electronic works through self-publishing platforms. We’ve even handed the keys to our cars and our homes to strangers.

On the face of it, the entrepreneurs have continued down the same track too: inventing ever more Disruptive companies to further improve the world, and in doing so enjoying multi-billion dollar valuations and all the trappings of fame and fortune. Even richer have grown the angels, super-angels and VCs who carefully nurture young entrepreneurs, molding them into the next breed of Mark Zuckerbergs and Sean Parkers, reminding their charges that “what’s cool” is a billion dollars — and that every new user acquired is another dollar added to their eventual high score.

And yet. AND YET. You only have to look at a couple of mini-outrages that bubbled up in the past few days to realize just how misaligned the interests of some entrepreneurs have become with those of the human beings they rely on for their success.

The first such mini-outrage was a controversial Huffington Post article that bore the headline "Amy Winehouse’s Untimely Death Is a Wake Up Call for Small Business Owners", which Carr offers as an example of the way content sites will pander to keywords and trending topics, even when it seems heartless to do so. There is truth to this, but he mostly ignores the fact that it is hardly a new complaint or one unique to the web: for decades people have accused newspapers and broadcasters of exploiting tragedies, perpetuating scare stories and generally using every dirty trick in the book to boost circulation or ratings. Carr is an avid media critic, who certainly knows this, so it's unclear to me why he puts so much blame on new technology. He notes that "every so often we are reminded of the grimy truth: making money with online content is a question of attracting millions of eyeballs, whatever the moral cost", but that grimy truth clearly predates online content. The dark side of the media might not have disappeared as quickly and as cleanly as many people hoped at the dawn of the web, but, in sum, we certainly seem better off with fewer gatekeepers to communication. At the very least, it makes a more solid foundation on which to build a new and better media landscape.

The second example is a recent Airbnb scandal. In short, a woman's apartment was trashed by a stranger who rented it through the service, she blogged about it, and one of the co-founders called her personally with an insensitive plea for her to take down the post because of the impact it could have on Airbnb's growth and funding. He later asked her to help give it a positive spin. She made it all public, and the story picked up steam:

Meanwhile, behind the scenes, we also know for sure that investors in the company leaned on publications like TechCrunch to stop reporting the story. Their ludicrous wail of protest: AIRBNB IS RUN BY NICE GUYS! IT’S NOT FAIR TO CALL THEM OUT WHEN THEY SCREW UP!

The question of whether Airbnb is run by nice guys is irrelevant. For all I know CEO Brian Chesky is a modern day Mother Theresa who had to break off his important work curing kitten cancer to deal with this growing PR nightmare. What’s relevant — and all too obvious — is that good old Brian and his co-founders stand to make millions, if not billions, of dollars from the success of Airbnb. His investors stand to make even more. That kind of wealth can easily drive the most saintly of us to behave in inhuman ways — to become so remote from reality and humanity that users like EJ become (at best) PR problems to be solved and (at worst) irrelevant pieces of data; eyeballs or clicks or room nights to be monetized in the pursuit of an ever greater exit.

Again, my disagreement is not with his observations but with his curious focus on the web and the tech sector. None of the actual problems are new. The world is far from perfect, and society is fueled by a lot more greed, inhumanity and injustice than anyone likes to admit - most of it immeasurably more terrible than these examples. Carr's concerns have been echoing through history since the birth of industrialization, and they have ancestors before that, so it's hard to see how the web has made things worse.

In fact, I firmly believe it has made things better. To fall back on a cliche, the first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem, and the democratization of communication and media makes society's problems a lot harder to ignore.

Jack Shafer at Slate does a nice job tying together the common thread in two recent stories: the Winklevoss twins losing in their attempt to back out of a previous settlement with Facebook and arguing that they are owed much more than the $170 million they've received despite their lack of work on Facebook itself... and Jonathan Tasini's almost universally mocked lawsuit against the Huffington Post for not paying him for articles he agreed to write for free (yes, you read that right). In both cases, these are situations where those who didn't actually build successful businesses totally overvalue some potentially tiny contribution they might have made, see that someone else did succeed and did make a ton of money... and they go back on a previous deal to demand more money they don't deserve:

What's Winklevossian about Tasini's suit is his timing. Just as the twins were happy with their settlement until they realized that the money pot had grown, Tasini helped himself to the HuffPo platform, no questions asked, until he saw a Brinks truck arrive with the AOL cash.

Elsewhere, Shafer notes that "we're becoming a nation of Winklevosses who file legal motion after legal motion every time a pot of money is spotted." Becoming? I'd argue that's been happening for quite some time. Over the years we've covered how nearly every super successful book or movie has someone jump out of the woodwork to claim that the idea was "copied."

Unpacking this deeper, I'd argue there are two key issues here. First, is that many people significantly overvalue an idea or a bit of content, assuming that it's worth much more than the structure or process around it. And, second, we've built a legal system in which all too often it pays for losers to litigate against those who succeed. There's a sense of entitlement that people feel towards anyone who succeeds, and people simply fail to recognize that they would never react the same way in the other direction. As I've pointed out before, if the writers, like Tasini, who are complaining or suing had received (for example) a job assignment due to their work on the Huffington Post, would they have given Arianna a cut of their earnings?

Unfortunately, our legal system often makes this kind of situation rewarding for the people who sue. It's often cheaper to settle such cases rather than let them go on, and that can be quite damaging to those who succeed. The basis of free market competition and innovation is that you reward the successes, not the failures. But all too often, our legal system is allowing the latter to happen.