AOL Exposed: A Former AOL Employee Speaks Out
thefastertimes.com
thefastertimes.com
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 instructions it sure seems like this isn't an "independent" work force.
http://www.irs.gov/businesses/small/article/0,,id=179115,00....
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 campaign.
17 U.S.C. § 101
A "work made for hire" is— (1) a work prepared by an employee within the scope of his or her employment; or (2) 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.
Collective or supplementary work? Not sure.
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.
Still I wonder what would happen if an AOL writer sued AOL for copyright infringement citing his/her constitutional rights.
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.
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 type of language do you use in your contracts to enforce this?
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.
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 have to e.g. work at proscribed locations during set hours?
* Does the worker control the business aspects of their work, for instance the cost of tools, the expenses incurred, &c.
* Has the company employing the worker done things to create a de facto employee relationship, such as offering benefits?
None of these are bright-line differences. Contractors routinely work on-site, 9-5, using tools provided by their employers; however, care has been taken in structuring the relationship (for instance, by working corp-to-corp with a large consulting firm or head shop that itself maintains a W2 relationship with the workers).
It is indeed possible or even likely that AOL is treading a fine line by 1099'ing the people writing its content. On the other hand, AOL can afford pretty good lawyers, and it's equally likely that every aspect of their workflow has been structured to avoid imputing employee status to people doing piecework writing for them. You should tone down your stridency. There are a lot of people on HN that consult professionally.
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.
Even if this were true (it isn't), what difference would it make? The content he was writing was ephemeral fluff, designed to fill the daily news hole. It's not like Wikipedia. They could lose everything that all these writers wrote up to 6 months ago and chances are that nobody would notice. Guy got fired because he would have had to be treated differently for tax purposes if they had kept him on the payroll any longer, I suspect.
Contracts of this type also would normally be expressly framed as work-for-hire contracts and would also provide for the assignment of all rights to work that did not technically meet the criteria of works made for hire. Such clauses are valid and enforceable and are indeed a staple of every tech developers invention-assignment agreement. They apply with equal force to works of authorship by an independent writer. Assuming the contract here is so framed, AOL would own the copyrights in the works of the author.
The employee-contractor question, on the other hand, is a tricky one. This is a murky area but one where, generally, the lower the skill level and the more the worker must abide by company-defined procedures and schedule in how the work is done (among many other factors), the greater the risk of being classified as an employee. Many writers work independently with no risk to anyone of their being treated as employees but the AOL situation described in this piece might be vulnerable to audit risks owing to its assembly-line aspects. Hard to say without knowing a lot more detail.
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...
Except perhaps the scale.
I worked for The (London) Times on a student scholarship back in the mid-90s.
I heard editors telling senior journalists to lie about anti-government movements, and asked to phone up a sister 'paper and lie about calling from another news organisation to find out whether a story was going to be run that weekend.
They offered me a job, but I turned it down. I'd had enough being a machine to generate words at university. I then had to chase them up for payment for my three weeks' work. A measly 150GBP (total) and they tried to screw me out of that.
Ironically I ended up working for Rupert Murdoch in IT again (in a completely separate non-media company - not MySpace) for 10 more years.
I worked for The (London) Times on a student scholarship back in the mid-90s.
I heard editors telling senior journalists to lie about anti-government movements, and asked to phone up a sister 'paper and lie about calling from another news organisation to find out whether a story was going to be run that weekend.
They offered me a job, but I turned it down. I'd had enough being a machine to generate words at university. I then had to chase them up for payment for my three weeks' work. A measly 150GBP (total) and they tried to screw me out of that.
Ironically I ended up working for Rupert Murdoch in IT again (in a completely separate non-media company - not MySpace) for 10 more years.
I have to say I read this article and thought: isn't this what journos are paid to do?
I get the impression that it's rather a lot like rock stardom, a lot of wanabees, with a few receiving all the pay/accolades.
The pay WAS terrible, but the job was nothing like what this AOL writer talks about. I was expected to research my stories and write them well, and was given time to do so. I would have quit if I'd been asked to crank out crap like this writer describes, and I'm sure any of my peers at the paper or in college would have done likewise. We had a lot of pride in doing good work.
I'm not sure how the financial model for journalism is going to shake out, but the world does need people who spend all their time finding out and explaining what's going on around us. It does not, however, need cookie-cutter, mindless sitcom reviews. I hope this kind of "content creation" dies a swift death.
It's an aggregator.
We've all got used to the aggregators like google making all the money by convincing everyone content should be free. It was the greatest and long-term wise worst achievement of the dot com boom.
I wouldn't say those are mutually exclusive.
you can't be a big single media content creator
And where can you see Vice TV other than online?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assets_owned_by_Disney
Anyone have a better example, or of the elusive single online content creator? (Like AOL tired / is trying to be). We have penny arcade as the leading example. http://www.penny-arcade.com/ and since I had never heard of them before this, I am skeptical, but I'm checking them out.
I can hardly imagine spending that time reading insipid, content mill junk. Who puts so low of a value on their time?
Sadly, lot of people, it would seem. AOL's still in business.
To take this a step further, for me, the only reason I'm ever exposed to garbage content is from google results. I'm not sure google will be able to solve this problem, or if they do, it won't be from taking the same approach that's made them successful. I expect that some sort of curated search engine(s) will be the solution in the future. What exactly this will look like, I have no idea... if I did know I would be trying to build it.
“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.
The goal is to create links which rank highly and raise the target in search results for search engines.
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.
They're not completely worthless, though. Real data + automated analysis is far better than no data or no analysis.
>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...
But upon reading them i'm impressed at exactly how generic this template is. I'm not sure they're actually doing harm, because frankly, these articles aren't analysis. They don't actually offer any judgement about the stocks in question. They're basically a textual presentation of some stock data that is designed to serve as a feeder into fool.com.
I can't say that i'm okay with it, but it's not as catastrophic as i had initially imagined. Still definitely SEO spam though :\ I am disappoint.
His words may or may not have merit, but his writing style is extremely persuasive. He got his message across and certainly made an impact. If only AOL took advantage of this, we might be reading an entirely different article.
But as Bezos once said: "You don't choose your passions. Your passions choose you."
It's not as pithy, though.
And, as other responses have pointed out, in all of these fields, people really, really want to do them. The number of writing jobs that are 'comfortable' (pick your number, $60k?) has sharply declined from the glory days of the newspaper industry, but it still has the same non-monetary attractions, and there are the still the same opportunities to become, say, a bestselling nonfiction author.
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.
I've been a subscriber to paid magazines/papers and I'll continue to be one to digital ones.
But I guess my kind is rare and of course the majority always wins.
There are a lot of people who only want "free" information (which is to say free news, free reviews, free self help advice, etc) and of course providing information is not 'free' as it costs real dollars to host it, to maintain it, to fix it up after the web site gets hacked etc.
To enable it to stay 'free' people put advertisements on the page which the advertiser pays the costs of hosting the content.
That creates an incentive to monetize the difference between the cost of the content and the revenue from the ads. Given the incentive all sorts of suppliers have arisen, from domain squatters at the low end, to businesses like Demand Media and AOL apparently.
If you look at content creation you will see that this is creating 'content' at an unsustainable rate. At some point, a small population at first, and then growing larger, of people will say "I'll pay you for information that is 'better' rather than pay the cost of wading through the free crap to get to the good stuff."
When that switch reaches a large enough number of readers, I believe it will 'spontaneously' create the actual market for purely digital information sources. The blend of subscriber revenue and modest ad revenue will create a better reader experience and quality companies will emerge to take advantage of that.
Okay, but the future has a plan. The plan doesn't involve AOL. This and the fact they refuse to cancel your account. What a pathetic company. Good job stockholders are dumb.
Every bonus taking banker raped the banks' stockholders. But nobody seems to care. Stockholders come bottom, behind customers, employees, and bigger creditors. It's not quite how capitalism was supposed to work.
Like you'd never know the US was in three wars or about to default on the deficit the past couple of weeks. Only PBS was mostly immune and BBC World.
I suppose we all need money, but there is a limit, by god, there is a limit.