Actual Free Labor?

Perhaps I misunderstood in class, but the tasks through Mechanical Turk (with the exception of the volunteer search effort referenced by Chad) are NOT free labor and don't pretend to be...it's stated clearly on their site that people request and pay for HITs (human intelligence tasks) while others complete the requested work and get paid for it (unless this example was part of a discussion on deskilling?)

I've been sitting on this clip for about a week (click to enlarge and read) that seems to be an example of Terranova's notion of "free labor that is not exploited," or what we've come to classify as free work. I followed the links in the article and this site is offered through Carnegie Mellon University and partially funded by the National Science Foundation.

This is good old (new?) fashioned volunteer work -- people freely giving work that is valued and without anyone profiting monetarily. Curiously, the "greater good" aspect of this work is not immediately clear when you get to the site.

Nevertheless, this is clearly different from the kind of "free labor" exploited by Netscape and Cygnus, but I wonder if there is still an exploitation blind spot lingering here somewhere. (Whoops, my cynical undies are showing.)

Does this seem legit to anyone else?