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AOL Exposed: A Former AOL Employee Speaks Out

thefastertimes.com

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Re: AOL Exposed: A Former AOL Employee Speaks Out

#81

Post by earbitscom »

I am a huge supporter of creatives and artists. That being said, I have only partial sympathy for this guy. Work is work and we all need it, particularly creatives, but when you take a job writing about things you don't know anything about, you can't complain that you're being asked to do so. If he hadn't seen the most popular shows on television, he took a job he wasn't qualified for. That's fine, but then, he couldn't be bothered to research the industry he was covering - when that research required sitting in front of a TV and watching The Simpsons. That's not exactly slave labor.

It's a shame that content production has become the ad mill that it has, and writing about that from an objective viewpoint with all of this guy's internal data would have been good journalism. But I have a hard time feeling sorry for someone who got paid $35k a year to write about cartoons and couldn't be bothered to watch some of them in his spare time.

Re: AOL Exposed: A Former AOL Employee Speaks Out

#85

Post by chopsueyar »

tptacek wrote: post #78
chopsueyar wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If you sign a professionally drafted contract stating that you are being compensated for writing done on a work-for-hire basis, you are not keeping the copyright to your work regardless of whether the IRS determines that your employer owes penalties and interest for stiffing them on your payroll taxes.

I am saying if you sign a work for hire agreement, and are later determined to be an employee, the company owns the IP because you are an employee of the company, not because you signed a 'work for hire' agreement.

Conversely, if the company assumed you didn't need to sign a 'work for hire' agreement because you were an employee, but the IRS determined you were a contractor, you would retain the rights to your works.

Re: AOL Exposed: A Former AOL Employee Speaks Out

#86

Post by chopsueyar »

tptacek wrote: post #77
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…

Virtually all contractors in our field work under "work-for-hire" clauses. I am baffled by the people voting you up and those questioning you down. It is not "in the Constitution" that two parties can't agree to a binding contract that transfers ownership of work product. The IRS tests for contractor vs. employee status break down to: * Does the worker control the "how" as well as the "what" of their task, or do they…

With regard to the Constitution, I was merely stating that the initial owner of a copyright in a work be the author.

So, without any other sort of agreement, the guy who made it is the guy who owns it.

The IRS employee vs contractor 'test' includes:

Behavioral: This includes type of instruction given, degree of instruction, evaluation systems, and training - http://www.irs.gov/businesses/small/article/0,,id=179111,00.....

Financial: This includes significant investment, reimbursed expenses, opportunity for profit or loss, services available to the market, and method of payment - http://www.irs.gov/businesses/small/article/0,,id=179113,00.....

Type of Relationship: This includes written contracts, employment benefits, permanency of the relationship, and services provided as key activities of the business - http://www.irs.gov/businesses/small/article/0,,id=179116,00.....

This issue has been around since at least 1989. Do you remember this?

http://www.reuters.com/article/2009/04/01/businesspropicks-u...

As for being strident, you are free to downvote. I am enjoying this discourse.

Re: AOL Exposed: A Former AOL Employee Speaks Out

#87

Post by [deleted] »

chopsueyar wrote: post #33
mikeryan wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

[deleted]

Re: AOL Exposed: A Former AOL Employee Speaks Out

#88

Post by chopsueyar »

mikeryan wrote: post #72
chopsueyar wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Code is patentable, but articles are not. What type of language do you use in your contracts to enforce this?

Code is patentable, but articles are not No actually code, on its own is not patentable, systems and algorithms are. All those cool Apache and BSD licenses are about copyright which apply equally to code and a news article.

Code as in software.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_software_patents

Re: AOL Exposed: A Former AOL Employee Speaks Out

#89

Post by tptacek »

chopsueyar wrote: post #85
tptacek wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you sign a professionally drafted contract stating that you are being compensated for writing done on a work-for-hire basis, you are not keeping the copyright to your work regardless of whether the IRS determines that your employer owes penalties and interest for stiffing them on your payroll taxes.

I am saying if you sign a work for hire agreement, and are later determined to be an employee, the company owns the IP because you are an employee of the company, not because you signed a 'work for hire' agreement. Conversely, if the company assumed you didn't need to sign a 'work for hire' agreement because you were an employee, but the IRS determined you were a contractor, you would retain the rights to your works.

What does any of this have to do with AOL?

Re: AOL Exposed: A Former AOL Employee Speaks Out

#90

Post by wging »

hugh3 wrote: post #37
jerf wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

OUCH. No mention of the contraction of the newspaper industry when discussing Gannett?

>Next, we want to ensure that Gannett's stock has the ability to rise over the next five, 10, or 20 years. A company that's growing its net income has the best possible chance to see its share price rise over time. Of course, we can't predict the future, but we can look back to get an idea of how the company has performed in the past in order to try to ensure future earnings growth. Over the past five years, Gannett has shrunk its net income at an annual rate of 13.9%. Unfortunately, Gannett has run into its own share of problems, and the financial collapse of 2008 certainly couldn't have helped either. So the company has been unable to grow earnings, which doesn't exactly mean that it won't in the future, but it's certainly not the greatest of signs.

from http://www.fool.com/retirement/general/2011/04/26/should-you...

It's kind of clear that it's auto-generated after just one. The only other possibility would be that "Jordan DiPetro" had a real point to make about what stock stats can tell you without any real knowledge...

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