"It hasn't had any ads in several years, but there were a couple unions that did buy some advertising," he said. "They wanted to support the work I was doing." So how much of that did he kick back to commenters and readers whose e-mails he ran? "There was never a thought that we would do that," he said. "Oh, I see what you're doing. Are you comparing my little blog to the Huffington Post? That's absurd."

"In my view, the Huffington Post's bloggers have essentially been turned into modern-day slaves on Arianna Huffington's plantation," he said. "She wants to pocket the tens of millions of dollars she reaped from the hard work of those bloggers....This all could have been avoided had Arianna Huffington not acted like the Wal-Marts, the Waltons, Lloyd Blankfein, which is basically to say, 'Go screw yourselves, this is my money.'"

"We are going to make Arianna Huffington a pariah in the progressive community," Tasini vowed. "No one will blog for her. She'll never [be invited to] speak. We will picket her home. We're going to make it clear that, until you do justice here, your life is going to be a living hell."

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, TheHuffingtonPost.com's continued assertion that it, alone, should be enriched by the valuable content provided by Plaintiff and the Classes has the broad detrimental effect of setting an artificially low price for the valuable digital content created by Plaintiff and the Classes, depressing the market for such content and, over the long term, having serious depressing effect on the value of intellectual content being created by Plaintiff and the Classes and on the ability of Plaintiff and the Classes to support themselves as creators of high quality, engaging, digital content.

According to Article 1, Section 8 of the United States Constitution, the purpose of copyright is "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" by allowing creators to be appropriately compensated for their contributions. Yet, despite our founders' intent, TheHuffingtonPost.com continues to assert that it, alone, should be enriched by the valuable content provided by Plaintiff and the Classes.

Defendants marketed themselves as a forum for news and ideas to get Plaintiff and the Classes to provide valuable content to it for free. In fact, TheHuffingtonPost.com intended to realize substantial revenues from the free content provided.

"In 1865, slavery was abolished by the 13th Amendment. No more free labor," Conyers said. "It abolished at the same time involuntary servitude. What does that have to do with what we're here for today? Well, when you tell somebody that you're benefiting from their work product but there's no avenue for compensation, it kind of harkens back to that great problem."