Arianna Huffington has posted a sharp rebuttal to the class-action lawsuit filed against The Huffington Post by Jonathan Tasani in behalf of its unpaid bloggers. Huffington calls the suit “a pile of bile” motivated by “utter cynicism.”

The same people who never question why someone would sit on a couch and watch TV for eight hours straight can’t understand why someone would find it rewarding to weigh in on the issues — great and small — that interest them. For free. They don’t understand the people who contribute to Wikipedia for free, who maintain their own blogs for free, who tweet for free, who constantly refresh and update their Facebook pages for free, and who want to help tell the stories of what is happening in their lives and in their communities… for free.

Elsewhere, she quotes from one of her defenders.

As Glynnis MacNicol describes it on Business Insider: “What Arianna was providing was a place for writers to advertise their wares — a sort of classified for wannabe writers, except unlike the classifieds, she wasn’t charging.”

Bottom line: the vast majority of our bloggers are thrilled to contribute — and we’re thrilled to have them.

These various metaphors used demonstrate the essential questions of this debate and of this suit: are unpaid writers exploited laborers (as Tasani claims), contented couch-sitting participants (as Huffington claims), or, customers getting a free service (as MacNicol claims)?

What seems clear is that internet media giants have cleverly figured out how to turn free crowd-sourced content into multi-million dollar industries. The unpaid bloggers clearly add some value to the website (and, as Huffington-supporters argue, clearly receive some non-monetary compensation). If the writers were organized in any fashion, they could make demands for a fair piece of the Huffington pie. But the ingenious nature of internet crowd-sourcing often circumvents the ability to organize; the unpaid writers are scattered and diverse and have never had a unified voice. Until, perhaps, now. It will be interesting to see what happens next. Will content creators be upgraded to paid workers or downgraded to profit-generating coach potatoes?

(As always, we’d love to hear your opinions in the comment section. It’s an important debate taking place in a drastically altered media reality. What will the rules be?)