Stop Online Piracy Act is a bill that was introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives in October 2011 by Lamar Smith (R-TX). This Act would allow the Department of Justice and copyright holders to seek court orders against websites accused of copyright infringement that would prevent online ad networks and payment facilitators from doing business with those websites. Opponents in this bill believe that this is Internet censorship. Google co-founder Sergey Brin, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, PayPal co-founder Elon Musk, and Yahoo! co-founder Jerry Yang oppose the bill. Their letter will appear as a paid ad in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other newspapers.

Peter Glatzer and Adrian Grenier has launched a new website called SHFT, which is a digital media platform that allows people to read content and buy products that are related to sustainable development. Galtzer is an indie film producer and Grenier is known for playing the character Vincent Chase on the hit show Entourage. The tagline of the website is “Curating the Culture of Today’s Environment.”

AOL, Inc. (NYSE:AOL) is having a hard time retaining some of their talent. Within the last couple of days, AOL saw Brad Garlinghouse and Sarah Lacy leave the company. Now former TechCrunch CEO Heather Harde is leaving the company. Harde became an executive at AOL after technology blog TechCrunch was acquired. It is believed that Harde was pissed when a Huffington Post CEO sent out an e-mail bashing TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington.

The Huffington Post Media Group has acquired online grassroots company Localocracy. The price of Localocracy was under $1 million according to sources with AllThingsD. The Huffington Post, which hit one billion page views in August, also announced that they were hiring New York Times senior columnist Lisa Belkin.

The Huffington Post has hit 100 million comments added to their website. The milestone was hit this past weekend. The Huffington Post averages about 175,000 new comments per day with over 4.45 million comments from last month itself.

Jonathan Tasini is a freelancer that is suing The Huffington Post for not paying bloggers. You may remember that The Huffington Post was acquired by AOL for $315 million. It turns out that Tasini has a blog of his own where he invites people to contribute without pay also.

Lawsuit
AOL, Inc. (NYSE:AOL) is being hit with a lawsuit by bloggers of the Huffington Post who believe that they should have been paid for their volunteer writing. The lawsuit is being led by lawsuit Jonathan Tasini. The class-action lawsuit was filed against The Huffington Post, AOL, and Arianna Huffington. AOL acquired The Huffington Post in February.

AOL, Inc. (NYSE:AOL) has just notified some of their staff members that they are going to consolidate some of their media properties. About 30 brands will be integrated into other properties as proposed by editor in chief Arianna Huffington. The properties include:
- Politics Daily being rolled into HuffPost Politics
- Walletpop being rolled into Daily Finance
- Urlesque being rolled into HuffPost Comedy
- Luxist being folded into Stylelist
- TV Squad being rolled into AOL TV
- Other AOL properties will keep their names, but will essentially become sub-headings within The Huffington Post

[Forbes]