I agree with all your points. However, the laws are there to protect the "desperate" and to enforce a minimum worth of an employee. In many situations, unpaid

I agree with all your points. However, the laws are there to protect the "desperate" and to enforce a minimum worth of an employee. In many situations, unpaid internships provide a cost to the employer. The trade-off is that any exceptional interns can become full time employees, already having had most of the training, resulting in a lower initial cost to employment (training, etc.). Even for full-time positions, straight from college hires are not ready to directly contribute. There's a window of time (depending on the job itself) that the college graduate, even having completed an internship, will not be able to meaningfully contribute. Most people who have just completed an internship at the company has this time drastically reduced (I'm not going to give made up statistics, but I've seen it reduce the time by 8 months). Now, the laws for unpaid internships are actually protecting the interns from non-internships. Based on the description in the blog, what they wanted as an army of people to compile a bunch of information without any direct supervision. This provides no benefit to the interns. They get the benefit of being immersed in corporate culture, but they are not receiving any relevant training or exposure to the field they would supposedly be interning for. This is exactly what the law is to protect against. If I'm a software development firm and get 15 unpaid interns to load servers into a moving van to change data centers, and all they do every day is load the van and unload it, they are directly providing benefit to the company with nothing in return, except they know that DL585's are heavy. Now, if they were part of the transition process, involved with the documenting and preparing for migration of the data center, document each step, what moves when and how, then the cabling/racking and bringup of machines at the new data center, they have suddenly learned some invaluable skills that are not taught in school. The point in the law is to defend against these situations by guaranteeing recompense for the student, whether it's invaluable skills (by guaranteeing they won't be used as free labor), class credit (helps towards degree), or a paycheck.