AOL Exposed: A Former AOL Employee Speaks Out • Hacker News Board

Re: AOL Exposed: A Former AOL Employee Speaks Out

#21

Post by SemanticFog » Fri, Jun 17, 2011, 8:01 PM UTC

There's nothing unique to AOL here. When I first got out of college, I interviewed at local newspapers up and down the east coast. Entry level jobs had awful pay, about $15K/yr, but it was a chance to break in to the business.

One grizzled editor chain smoked cigarettes through our interview (you could do that in the office back then). He listened to me describe why I wanted to write. Then he leaned back, blew a cloud of smoke, and told me:

"You kid come into this business thinking you're going to make a difference. Pretty soon you find out, you're just filling the space around the ads."

He was right, actually. So I got into high tech instead, and have been doing startups ever since. Not sure I always make a difference, but at least I'm trying, instead of just filling space...

Re: AOL Exposed: A Former AOL Employee Speaks Out

#22

Post by omarchowdhury » Fri, Jun 17, 2011, 8:03 PM UTC

kylelibra wrote: post #9

omarchowdhury wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author did give us the keywords to find this out on our own.

I realize that, but I figured I would stick it in the comments in case it helped anyone.

I didn't mean to undermine you, only that I noticed a cleverness in the author's placement of the keywords. He gave us the exact keywords to find the actor who had issues with him, without directly stating who it was. This goes against the whole keyword driven doctrine at AOL, where the keywords used are explicit in who they are trying to promote.

Re: AOL Exposed: A Former AOL Employee Speaks Out

#23

Post by chopsueyar » Fri, Jun 17, 2011, 8:06 PM UTC

jeffreymcmanus wrote: post #18

chopsueyar wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is not the only criteria. See this comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2666507 The other issue is, as a contractor, the contractor retains all copyrights to the material created. Work for hire does not apply in this instance. He could send a DMCA takedown notice and have all of his articles removed, or organize all the other unemployed writers and coordinate a massive DMCA takedown letter writing campai…

It's not the case that contractors are guaranteed copyright to their work; in fact, the opposite is more common. The issue of copyright doesn't come up in the IRS criteria for contractor vs. employee.

It's not the case that contractors are guaranteed copyright to their work; in fact, the opposite is more common.

It is in the constitution, actually, "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;"

The issue of copyright doesn't come up in the IRS criteria for contractor vs. employee.

No, but the IRS's determination of the business relationship between the two parties affects the applicability of work-for-hire.

Re: AOL Exposed: A Former AOL Employee Speaks Out

#24

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Jun 17, 2011, 8:09 PM UTC

metageek wrote: post #15

chopsueyar wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is not the only criteria. See this comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2666507 The other issue is, as a contractor, the contractor retains all copyrights to the material created. Work for hire does not apply in this instance. He could send a DMCA takedown notice and have all of his articles removed, or organize all the other unemployed writers and coordinate a massive DMCA takedown letter writing campai…

That's the default, but I'm pretty sure the contract can say AOL gets the copyright.

[deleted]

Re: AOL Exposed: A Former AOL Employee Speaks Out

#25

Post by dpapathanasiou » Fri, Jun 17, 2011, 8:19 PM UTC

“Do you guys even CARE what I write? Does it make any difference if it’s good or bad?” I said.

“Not really,” was the reply.

If he had any programming background, he missed a golden opportunity to write a markov text generator which would have let him meet his deadlines without the stress.

Re: AOL Exposed: A Former AOL Employee Speaks Out

#26

Post by spaghetti » Fri, Jun 17, 2011, 8:21 PM UTC

Just an aside: would have been awesome if the writer created an article generating program. He could feed the program a few key words (perhaps just the name of the TV show). The program could scrape or be manually fed some information from Google trends. Then add some scraping of data from existing articles. Use a markov chain to keep the content fresh and you're good to go! I'm just thinking of the sentence generation via markov chain from Programming Pearls and the hilarious auto-generated computer science papers that were submitted and accepted by some journal.

Re: AOL Exposed: A Former AOL Employee Speaks Out

#27

Post by spaghetti » Fri, Jun 17, 2011, 8:23 PM UTC

dpapathanasiou wrote: post #25

“Do you guys even CARE what I write? Does it make any difference if it’s good or bad?” I said. “Not really,” was the reply. If he had any programming background, he missed a golden opportunity to write a markov text generator which would have let him meet his deadlines without the stress.

You beat me to it :-). I'm curious to what extent this is being done today.

Re: AOL Exposed: A Former AOL Employee Speaks Out

#28

Post by jerf » Fri, Jun 17, 2011, 8:28 PM UTC

dpapathanasiou wrote: post #25

“Do you guys even CARE what I write? Does it make any difference if it’s good or bad?” I said. “Not really,” was the reply. If he had any programming background, he missed a golden opportunity to write a markov text generator which would have let him meet his deadlines without the stress.

Obviously a straight-up Markov Chain generator isn't going to work, but a smarter system that would allow you to basically sketch the article and then have the system automatically babble in English to fill out the word count while not actually needing any additional information strikes me as feasible, though not trivial.

Somebody's doing something similar for sports reporting: http://thenextweb.com/media/2011/04/18/robot-journalist-writ... You'd have to tweak it for a different domain but I'm sure that would be feasible for your average gossip-rag type story.

Re: AOL Exposed: A Former AOL Employee Speaks Out

#29

Post by ryanisinallofus » Fri, Jun 17, 2011, 8:30 PM UTC

chopsueyar wrote: post #23

jeffreymcmanus wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not the case that contractors are guaranteed copyright to their work; in fact, the opposite is more common. The issue of copyright doesn't come up in the IRS criteria for contractor vs. employee.

It's not the case that contractors are guaranteed copyright to their work; in fact, the opposite is more common. It is in the constitution, actually, "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;" The issue of copyright doesn't come up in the IRS criteria for contractor vs. employee. No, but…

You usually sign agreements before starting contract work for those companies right? I assume they cover it in there.

Still I wonder what would happen if an AOL writer sued AOL for copyright infringement citing his/her constitutional rights.

Re: AOL Exposed: A Former AOL Employee Speaks Out

#30

Post by patrickgzill » Fri, Jun 17, 2011, 8:37 PM UTC

chopsueyar wrote: post #12

aresant wrote: post #3

"AOL paid us as “independent contractors," AOL is treading a fine, fine line there. The IRS defines an independent contractor as: "The general rule is that an individual is an independent contractor if the payer has the right to control or direct only the result of the work and not what will be done and how it will be done." This is a notoriously ambiguous definition but with AOL's rigorous guidelines, deadlines, and…

That is not the only criteria. See this comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2666507 The other issue is, as a contractor, the contractor retains all copyrights to the material created. Work for hire does not apply in this instance. He could send a DMCA takedown notice and have all of his articles removed, or organize all the other unemployed writers and coordinate a massive DMCA takedown letter writing campai…

Depends on the contract the IC signs with AOL. However, unless the copyright to the work(s) is specifically assigned, it remains with the creator. My guess is that AOL has this covered however.