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AOL Exposed: A Former AOL Employee Speaks Out

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Re: AOL Exposed: A Former AOL Employee Speaks Out

#31

Post by mikeryan »

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…

As someone who runs a application design and development business I have yet to receive or sign a contract that doesn't explicitly state the final disposition for the rights to the resulting IP. I would find it hard to believe that there's a publishing outlet that doesn't do the same in their contractor agreements, particularly with writers.

Re: AOL Exposed: A Former AOL Employee Speaks Out

#32

Post by chopsueyar »

ryanisinallofus wrote: post #29
chopsueyar wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The issue is that the agreement may not be valid because of the business relationship between the two entities.

A "work made for hire" is anything an employee makes in the scope of his or her employment OR as a contractor "...a work specially ordered or commissioned for use as a contribution to a collective work, as a part of a motion picture or other audiovisual work, as a translation, as a supplementary work, as a compilation, as an instructional text, as a test, as answer material for a test, or as an atlas, if the parties expressly agree in a written instrument signed by them that the work shall be considered a work made for hire."

If he was treated by AOL as a contractor, but was determined by the IRS to be an employee, he would be entitled to a refund for the excessive taxes he paid as a contractor and AOL would then be liable for those taxes. However, he would lose all IP rights to the content (because he was an employee).

However, if he were an employee, and the IRS determined he was a contractor, and there was no written "work made for hire" agreement (because the company assumed he was an employee and a signed agreement was unnecessary), he would retain all rights to his works.

In his specific case, if is is determined by the IRS to be a contractor, the agreement he signed would have to be specifically for a "work made for hire" and his works were "...specially ordered or commissioned for use as a contribution to a collective work, as a part of a motion picture or other audiovisual work, as a translation, as a supplementary work, as a compilation, as an instructional text, as a test, as answer material for a test, or as an atlas."

I'm not sure if writing search engine spam constitutes any of those.

Re: AOL Exposed: A Former AOL Employee Speaks Out

#33

Post by chopsueyar »

mikeryan wrote: post #31
chopsueyar wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As someone who runs a application design and development business I have yet to receive or sign a contract that doesn't explicitly state the final disposition for the rights to the resulting IP. I would find it hard to believe that there's a publishing outlet that doesn't do the same in their contractor agreements, particularly with writers.

Code is patentable, but articles are not.

What type of language do you use in your contracts to enforce this?

Re: AOL Exposed: A Former AOL Employee Speaks Out

#34

Post by noonespecial »

spaghetti wrote: post #26

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 generati…

It would be double-awesome if he submitted under the pseudonym "Chane Markov".

Re: AOL Exposed: A Former AOL Employee Speaks Out

#35

Post by chopsueyar »

patrickgzill wrote: post #30
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…

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.

He may be determined to be an employee by the IRS. He would then lose all IP rights, but would receive a tax refund, while AOL would receive a tax penalty.

Re: AOL Exposed: A Former AOL Employee Speaks Out

#36

Post by ChuckFrank »

Creating content online is NOT a viable business model. Recent history is littered with new content creators, and they've failed. The viable business model is either to host other content - YouTube, Hulu, Pandora, GrooveShark, Earbits, etc - Or to create content that is agnostic as to their use - Hollywood Studios, NY Publishers, Music Labels. - So either AOL should transition to a creator, or transition to a online host. It can't expect to have a viable future by creating content for online only. This is true of AOL and any other business model that tries this. JustinTV - Hosts, ESPN - Hosts, The WKUK - Creators, Monty Python - Creators. So please, once and for all, let's stop imagining these Online Studios, or these Online Magazine, or even worse, these Ipad Magazines. Instead think Vice. They've got music, magazines, tv, movies, and they don't care where you see it. http://www.vbs.tv/ - http://www.viceland.com/ . Just a bunch of Canadians that thought that they could rewrite the magazine business model by giving away their magazines for free. And look where that's taken them. So to recap. Make your choice, either host or create, and abide by their distinct rules.

Re: AOL Exposed: A Former AOL Employee Speaks Out

#37

Post by hugh3 »

jerf wrote: post #28
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/…

The Motley Fool also uses automatically-generated articles. For instance if you google the phrase "Being able to retire rich, or at least comfortable, is the goal of almost any investor" you'll find hundreds of articles from fool.com, each posing as an analysis of a particular company, and all generated with an algorithm which is fairly obvious after reading a couple of 'em.

They're not completely worthless, though. Real data + automated analysis is far better than no data or no analysis.

Re: AOL Exposed: A Former AOL Employee Speaks Out

#38

Post by hugh3 »

ChuckFrank wrote: post #36

Creating content online is NOT a viable business model. Recent history is littered with new content creators, and they've failed. The viable business model is either to host other content - YouTube, Hulu, Pandora, GrooveShark, Earbits, etc - Or to create content that is agnostic as to their use - Hollywood Studios, NY Publishers, Music Labels. - So either AOL should transition to a creator, or transition to a online…

Plenty of folks are making money by creating and serving content online.

Re: AOL Exposed: A Former AOL Employee Speaks Out

#39

Post by regularfry »

noonespecial wrote: post #34
spaghetti wrote: post #26

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 generati…

It would be double-awesome if he submitted under the pseudonym "Chane Markov".

I think "Markoff Chainey" might be more suitable :-)

Re: AOL Exposed: A Former AOL Employee Speaks Out

#40

Post by pavel_lishin »

ChuckFrank wrote: post #36

Creating content online is NOT a viable business model. Recent history is littered with new content creators, and they've failed. The viable business model is either to host other content - YouTube, Hulu, Pandora, GrooveShark, Earbits, etc - Or to create content that is agnostic as to their use - Hollywood Studios, NY Publishers, Music Labels. - So either AOL should transition to a creator, or transition to a online…

How many businesses have to succeed at it before it's considered a viable business model? How many have to fail before it's not?

And where can you see Vice TV other than online?

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