TheAgitator.com
I Demand You Pay Me for the Work I Agreed To Do for Free
Tuesday, April 12th, 2011I realize this is going to look like I’m just shilling for my future employer, but really, what the hell am I missing about this Huffington Post controversy?
A bunch of people agreed to write for Huffington Post for free. Or rather, in exchange for a platform that gave them access to a pretty large audience. They did this knowing full well that the goal of Huffington Post has always been to eventually become profitable. If they agreed to sit behind their keyboards and voluntarily churn out free content, how exactly have they been exploited? And on what basis could they possibly argue that those prior agreements should change now that the site has been purchased by AOL?
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve written for free over the years. It’s how you get a foot in the door. It has never occurred to me to go back and sue all of those publications. Come to think of it, I’ve been writing for all of you for free for the last nine years. Expect a visit from my process server soon.
The Huffington Post is old news. I look forward to reading the Agitator on the Colbuffington Re-Post.
I think you are missing the lawsuit aspect. Your comments work if they are just complaining about it. But they are suing and chances are they will get a nice settlement offer out of it. Don’t hate the playa, hate the game.
From the article:
I remember that. This was a big deal at the time. The issue wasn’t that they were unpaid volunteers, but rather that they were assigned duties that they had to preform in order to STAY unpaid volunteers. I have no idea if this applies to the current issue, but it is an important concept. Volunteers have to be free to unilaterally decide how much ‘volunteering’ is appropriate.
it all goes to content producers overvaluing their content. Google MPAA, RIAA, etc.
To be fair, there are those of us who are disappointed that the status quo rewards hot-air-filled no-nothing corporate figureheads when their employees make their businesses successful. I’m not saying this particular claim does or does not have merit but the notion that the people who worked hard to make a business strong have nothing to gain aside from their promised slave wages is not one I embrace as an economic ideal. It’s mostly arbitrary that an owner is primarily responsible for their successes or failures.
Not that I think disgruntled workers should automatically sue for wages they were definitely never promised but sometimes the fact that they were not promised doesn’t mean it isn’t deserved.
Great! He can pick up the bill for all of my pithy comments delivered over the years! I’ve been working with telco and network providers a lot lately, so I bill in 1/4 hour increments, two hour minimum.
I wouldn’t really say it’s deserved. I think most people that read the Huffington Post would acknowledge that the Bloggers are just side bar window dressing for the articles that the Huffington Posts appropriates from other news sources. The bloggers help further the pretense that they are more than a Fark.com or any other news aggregation website, but nobody reads that crap.
#5 | Mitch | April 12th, 2011 at 11:58 am
I’ve lived that reality – with actual handshake promises. I’ve learned that a handshake promise is often not worth the paper it wasn’t written on. On the other hand, my fellow execs and I have a nice story to share about how we helped someone else get F-U money.
Money quote during the leveraged buyout when asked about the promised comp adjustments: “That ship has sailed…”
Live and learn, live and learn….
Hey . . .
Lawyers have to make a living, or they become politicians.
Call off your attack dogs! I bought a t-shirt which I happen to be wearing right now.
Screw that. I paid you with my lost productivity!
Stupid jokes aside, this will be interesting to watch play out.
Wow, according to the piece linked, I should have been HuffPo chatroom moderator. I’d be filthy rich.
Anyway, if the contributors didn’t sign an actual contract saying they would provide a certain amount of content over a certain amount of time for free, then I don’t see why they can’t just inform HuffPo that now they would like to start being paid for future work or they will quit. Nothing wrong with that, and if HuffPo doesn’t want to pay, the writers can take a hike.
Suing for back pay, when there was no agreement to be paid? That’s a douchebag move.
Radley – You aren’t alone in your thoughts, even as a HuffPo potential employee – read Paul Carr’s thoughts (TechCrunch, HuffPo) here: http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/04/schmucks-with-movabletype-credentials/ Very much the same as you are expressing.
It would be difficult to have a enforceable contract requiring free labor. Agreements without consideration are unenforcable. While I have no idea about the merits of the current suit, the legal relationship between the blogs and the ownership of the site will be a key issue.
I think the issue is not that the Huffington Post chose to become profitable, but that it chose to do so by selling content it’s not clear it had ownership of. To make an analogy, if you ask to borrow my car and I after I agree, you use it to drive to work, I can’t come back and sue you, claiming that I deserve some part of your pay. On the other hand, if you ask to borrow my car and I after I agree, you go down to the used car lot and sell it, I have legitimate reason to want the proceeds.
I’m working out my commission fees you owe me for all the people I’ve directed your way.
According to Arianna’s ideology, she should be happy to give anything she makes to the government, who can then redistribute it wisely and fairly, in a way that an individual could never do or even comprehend. Then everyone is happy and there are no profits to fight over anyway. Why is she being so greedy?
#3:
“I remember that. This was a big deal at the time. The issue wasn’t that they were unpaid volunteers, but rather that they were assigned duties that they had to preform in order to STAY unpaid volunteers. I have no idea if this applies to the current issue, but it is an important concept. Volunteers have to be free to unilaterally decide how much ‘volunteering’ is appropriate.”
Huh? What does that even mean? If I’m asking for volunteers and you tell me you want in, I might tell you that you need to do X for Y hours in order to be a volunteer for me. If you don’t want to do those tasks, I won’t have you as a volunteer.
People think they deserve things. I can understand why they might complain about it but I can’t see any grounds on which to sue.
Furthermore, ownership rights to the material were not taken away from the volunteer writers. Whatever they agreed to are still in force. I’m sure the disgruntled writers could simply request that their material be deleted.
Let’s hope these morons learn a lesson by losing a significant portion of the readers they built up because of their petty whining.
#14 – Stormy
I disagree with that analogy. There is no way to “lend” someone online content, unless there was some sort of agreement that HuffPo would take down the content after a certain amount of time. The more apt analogy would be if you GAVE (permanently) someone your car for free, and then they turned around and sold it. Would you have a legal claim to the proceeds from that? I don’t think so.
Mitch:
“It’s mostly arbitrary that an owner is primarily responsible for their successes or failures.”
Not only is that completely false, it makes it quite clear that you have never run a business (or a successful one, anyway). The fact that *you* may look at a CEO (you know, those “hot-air-filled no[sic]-nothing corporate figureheads”) and wonder what he does all day is irrelevant.
You evidently have no idea how much work and risk from the owners is involved while those bloggers get to sit back and do exactly what they want to do (write) while getting free exposure to an international audience. Frankly, if they’re too stupid to figure out how to turn hundreds of thousands of free clicks into cash, then no, they don’t “deserve” it.
Re: Colbuffington Repost: LMFAO! Like Meat Loaf, I couldn’t have said it better myself.
Here’s the thing with writing: it can be an extremely lucrative enterprise. Or it can be one requiring the writer to spend a decade taking grants from the National Bank of Dad, flipping burgers at Hollywood and Vine, or a combination of both.
Quality isn’t the only thing that determines profitability. A big factor, as Radley mentioned, is exposure. The thing is, it doesn’t have to be exposure as a good writer. Oftentimes any sort of fame will do, whether as a singer, an actor, or a national laughingstock. That’s why Lawrence Welk was a published author. (Thanks to a clearance sale at the Lebanon, PA, Library, I briefly owned a copy of “Ah One, Ah Two.” I think I left it for some sorry passenger to find in the free rack at the Lancaster Amtrak station.) Chuck Norris, too, is a published author, and a surprisingly good one, notwithstanding his conspiracy theories about President Obama, but “Black Belt Democracy” would have been published even if it had been complete garbage. To wit, Snooki’s masterpiece, “A Shore Thing;” read it and weep.
At the other extreme, one finds serious authors like James Frey getting chewed up and spit out by the publishing buzzsaw. In the space of a few years, Frey went from celebrated memoirist, interviewed by Oprah, to sleazy fraud who faked his back story of meth addiction, to celebrated novelist.
Frankly, although I don’t condone his presenting “A Million Little Pieces” as a memoir, I don’t blame him, either. The same work was rejected by over a dozen publishers when he presented it as a novel but was quickly accepted when he presented it as a memoir on his agent’s advice. Thankfully, that tempest in a literary teapot passed in time and he was able to get a platform for “Bright Shiny Morning,” a novel that I can’t recommend highly enough, especially for anyone interested in Los Angeles. It’s one of the most stunningly poignant pieces of fiction I’ve ever read. And I’d say it says something about the publishing industry that Frey’s manuscripts were constantly rejected and Snooki was able to get published at all.
Prior agreements aside, the pay dispute at HuffPo is one between unpaid contributors and the quite profitable publisher for which they work. I’m undecided about whether they’re sleazy to sue for back pay because I’m very much decided that HuffPo was sleazy to build its business on their backs and will prove itself even sleazier if it refuses to pay them retroactively now that cash flow is strong.
I think the crux of the problem is that the publishing industry is one that has been allowed free rein to take advantage of unpaid labor for highly productive and profitable work. Doing so isn’t any less sleazy because the workers get exposure. Exposed or not, the worker bees bust their asses producing material that makes their employer’s enterprise viable, and in exchange they often aren’t able to afford rent and groceries without a side job or outside help.
I submit that the unpaid internship model is largely a scam, and that even to the extent that it is not a scam it greatly distorts labor markets to the detriment of the poor and middling. For a great example, take a look at the fiasco at Elephant Journal over the abrupt departure of an unpaid intern after two days on the job. The whole story reads like a parody of Stuff White People Like: an online magazine based in Boulder and devoted various sorts of Eastern spirituality compensates its interns with yoga sessions and sushi dinners in lieu of paychecks, then has a public kumbaya circle of sorts to talk over its grievances with the disgruntled former intern. A number of people in Boulder have intimated, and understandably so, that Elephant Journal’s founder/executive/guru, Waylon Lewis, is running some kind of scam and cult.
If publications such as the Huffington Post and Elephant Journal should be allowed to profit from the work of unpaid interns, let me suggest that Denny’s and Steak-n-Shake be allowed to hire unpaid line cooks and waitresses. Allow United Airlines to have unpaid pilots fly its 747s. Allow Ford to employ unpaid engineers and assembly line workers. Or maybe we should be generous to the help and restrict unpaid shifts to slow nights, money-losing routes and production lines for dud models.
Bullshit propositions? Of course. Even insolvency isn’t ipso facto grounds for a company to delay or cancel payroll. Extreme measures may need to be taken to keep operating, but diners, airlines and car companies aren’t allowed to decide not to pay their workers because times are tight or management would like a bonus. As far as I’m concerned, for-profit publishers shouldn’t be allowed such latitude, either. And if they try to make an end run around normal compensation practices by claiming to inhabit some gray area of incorporation that doesn’t apply to other industries, they’re sleazy moochers.
HuffPo’s contributors sound like they’d be well served by membership in the Writers Guild or a similar union. The Guild wouldn’t hesitate to tell management to give the help a damned paycheck already, and file suit in the event of recalcitrance.
We certainly appreciate all the hard work!
@Sean, you’re conflating ownership and management. In the vast majority of public corporations, the owners (i.e. shareholders) have very little to do with business operations. As for whether CEO’s add value comparable to their compensation, I would recommend the article “The Difference That CEOs Make: As Assignment Value Approach” from a couple years ago, Tervio, Marko. 2008. “The Difference That CEOs Make: An Assignment Model Approach.” American Economic Review, 98(3): 642–68. It found that CEO pay had little effect on shareholder value.
The analogy that comes to my mind is of being in a rock band. One joins the band with no promises of anything, yet everyone hopes that the band will become popular and possibly make its members enough money to party a whole bunch. But once the band gets popular and signs a record deal (does anyone do that anymore?), the singer decides that he’s the only one that will get paid and expects everyone else to keep working for free while he makes money off of the band’s collective hard work. Hardly seems right.
“let me suggest that Denny’s and Steak-n-Shake be allowed to hire unpaid line cooks and waitresses. Allow United Airlines to have unpaid pilots fly its 747s. Allow Ford to employ unpaid engineers and assembly line workers. Or maybe we should be generous to the help and restrict unpaid shifts to slow nights, money-losing routes and production lines for dud models.”
Are you suggesting that people will work at Denny’s for nothing? Well, since we have no free will, competing interests or rational agency, I suppose you’re right.
And Ford will surely rake in the dollars with that “unpaid engineers” new business model. The only thing stopping such a brilliant strategy must be government restrictions.
“let me suggest that Denny’s and Steak-n-Shake be allowed to hire unpaid line cooks and waitresses.”
Err, why not? I suspect that no one will go for it, since it’s a crappy job in addition to being unpaid, but just maybe there’s someone out there that really wants to learn how to cook greasy, mediocre food in short order.
Why should the government step in to stop him from volunteering?
And Ford will surely rake in the dollars with that “unpaid engineers” new business model.
I’m sure they already have those; they’re called college interns (or externs, or whatever).
Engineering interns are paid at a higher rate than any job I ever held in my life prior to holding an engineering degree myself.
Just for clarification.
AOL still exists?
@Andrew Roth
It’s simple economics. People decide the future RoI as being significant enough to forgo immediate monetary gain, so they work for free. That’s not mentioning the non-monetary benefits of being a writer, the lifestyle. There is no distortion of the labor market, this is how it’s supposed to work. Low wages are the market signal that that particular sector is over-saturated. The govt redistributing income would only serve to distort market conditions, possibly, encouraging more people to become writers.
You may not agree with the idea of intellectual property, but for the time being it exists. Until that changes there is a way to “lend” someone online content as far as the law is concerned. Unless the Huffington post has secured some right to transfer the content to AOL, they’re at the mercy of the legally recognized owners.
Now the HP apparently feels they do have this right, while some of the bloggers feels they don’t.
In other words, exactly the sort of dispute that civil courts were created to resolve.
Yeah, when I was an engineering intern, I was pulling in close to $25/hour. Of course, engineering labor is a supply limited market, which gives the interns a lot more leverage than ones in field like entertainment or politics where the supply is demand limited.
You missed my point. I’m not saying that there aren’t intellectual property rights. I’m saying that HuffPo owns those rights, not the bloggers. I’m not sure how you are insinuating that these bloggers “lent” their postings to HuffPo at all. Generally speaking, anything you create for your employer within the course of your employment (paid or not) belongs to your employer, not you. In this case, they wrote blog postings for a website. Their “compensation” was being featured on a popular and widely-read website. Unless there was some sort of agreement that limited HuffPo’s usage rights of these writings, then using a “lending” analogy is off-base.
The only way that could be true a priori is if HP wants to argue that the bloggers were doing “work for hire”. And I can guaratnee that the bloggers would LOVE for HP to make that argument in court.
“Turning profitable” is different from “capitalizing on unpaid labor”. The writers’ understanding of what “turning profitable” meant may have been different from selling out.
This is about as funny as Nexflix getting sued by deaf people because Microsoft Silver doesn’t do closed captions.
I have some friends who are professional dancers. lovely people. anyway, they live in central CA but three weekends a month they fly to Vegas to dance in clubs there. as you can imagine, the clubs there are nuts and the girls make a lot of cash.
here’s the kicker; the girls pay the club owner $1K a weekend to work there. they aren’t offering their talents for free a la the Huffpo, they are paying to get in the door. they do this because they know that is how they will eventually make money. For the last few years they come home $2-$3K richer.
I imagine there must have been at least one writer who wanted the Huffpo exposure. and I’m sure that writer planned to bail as soon as they got the sustainable income. is it wrong that Huffpo got there first?
But once the band gets popular and signs a record deal (does anyone do that anymore?), the singer decides that he’s the only one that will get paid and expects everyone else to keep working for free while he makes money off of the band’s collective hard work. Hardly seems right.
Then quit playing in the band! Who cares if he “expects” you to keep playing? You have no obligation to him!
Stormy,
OK, for now I’ll cede to you the point that the bloggers still own the copyright to their work. Which means they can pull it from HuffPo whenever they want. But I am having a hard time with their reasoning for demanding retroactive compensation for HuffPo’s displaying of the work, when they explicitly allowed HuffPo to display it for years without any sort of compensation, or agreement for future compensation. That is not the way unjust enrichment was taught in my torts class.
Unjust enrichment usually applies that one party profits at another’s expense. But there was no expense to the bloggers here. They contributed something to HuffPo expecting only to be published (and the fame and readership that goes along with it) in return. Now that HuffPo has gained some enrichment, they just want a cut.
Why is the concept of free will so elusive to some people?
When a company starts rounding up people by force to work for them (like the government does with military conscription, and indirectly does via income taxes), then come tell me about abuse of power in the private sector.
Until then, don’t work for anyone who doesn’t compensate you a fair amount. Go elsewhere or start your own business. And, don’t whine that there’s nothing else available, because that’s not the fault of the people offering jobs.
“Come to think of it, I’ve been writing for all of you for free for the last nine years. Expect a visit from my process server soon.”
And I you. But it’s cool. No charge, call it an even trade.
It would likely depend on the exact terms of the agreement between the HP and AOL, which Tasini probably won’t be able to see until discovery, hence the need for a lawsuit.
If HP was just selling its brand to AOL, then there likely is no basis. If they sale included the content on the site, then Tasini can argue they were selling something they didn’t actually own.
@CyniCAl #42: You dog. *grin*
The name of the game is settlement, I guess. Whatever the legal fees are to defend, is the economically rational number on which to settle.
Legal extortion. Except its unclear why extortion should be illegal in the first place.
Except for this form of it, since one is focred to act in order to defend against the seizure of their property. In contrast, normal extortion (gimme 20 bucks or I tell Hillary what you did with Monica) requires no defensive action.
So, the one form that is legal is the one that shouldn’t be.
@Manju: I hope most people would hold that reputation is more valuable than property.
Re: Elliot, #41:
You’re perfectly free to give up your U.S. citizenship whenever you like, if you dislike meeting the obligations that come with your rights & privileges so much. Conscription in the U.S. isn’t quite like it is in, say, North Korea. In the U.S., if you are male, 18-45, can vote and can shoot a rifle, you are almost certainly a member of the militia. The obligation to serve at need is part & parcel of citizenship, and in many states, refusal to serve constitutes treason.
DPirate: Well, in the example I cited, its was a false reputation that was considered valuable.
So, on that count you may have a point. Its likely most would value these false impressions of themselves over their property. Why else spend so much time cultivating them?
Now as to why we criminalize threatening to reveal the truth…
Then quit playing in the band! Who cares if he “expects” you to keep playing? You have no obligation to him!
In that situation I would also want the singer to stop using my work without pay, for example by re-recording all the songs I’d been playing in.
Does HP have a facility for authors to take down their work?
I’ve noticed that, in general, communities don’t like being monetised. If the guy running the show gets enough money out of it to keep the lights on, that’s great; if he starts buying Rolls-Royces, people tend to feel like they’ve been tricked into becoming his “assets”. The morality is a bit unclear, but at the very least AOL/HP should have seen this coming.
What about linking? I have linked and quoted your writing many times over the years. If I send you traffic, don’t I get a cut too? Or by creating interesting reader content with these links, am I using you to create more value in my blog?
So…. why wouldn’t everyone who has linked these HuffPo writer plaintiffs be entitled to some share of whatever they might recover?
And what about the inevitable blog traffic that the HuffPo lawsuit generates? Who benefits?
I think it’s a quagmire.
In that situation I would also want the singer to stop using my work without pay, for example by re-recording all the songs I’d been playing in.
If you helped write the songs, you should get a cut of whatever he makes off of them. If you merely played the songs the singer wrote, you deserve compensation for those gigs, but I’m not sure why you think you should be compensated if then plays those same songs with another band. Does an NBA star owe part of his salary to his little league coach? His old high school teammates?
Then quit playing in the band! Who cares if he “expects” you to keep playing? You have no obligation to him!
The bandmates have no obligation to keep playing but does the bandleader have an obligation to share the earnings of the group’s collective hard work? Seems like a no-brainer to me.
Everyone put their efforts into the band with the expectation that they would all share in the earnings from that hard work. The people who started out as equal partners in the creative effort (poor bass players!) were cut out of the earnings yet expected to keep up the same level of work so those earnings could continue to come in.
For me, it would all come down to the precise nature of the prior agreement. Was there any written agreement for a share in future earnings?
@Bergman (#47), my ancestors were here first, and the respect for individual freedom after the American Revolution (with the obvious exception of slavery, American Indians) makes present day “love it or leave it” advocates of big government out of place. In other words, if anyone ought to leave, it’s them.
Oh, a kinder, gentler slavery.
The “obligation” is a fiction made up by people trying to justify the immoral act of slavery. No one has an obligation to do anything without an actual choice. Happening to be born between certain lines on a map doesn’t count.
As for treason, I’ll refer you to Lysander Spooner’s “No Treason” essays. See also: William Lloyd Garrison, Henry David Thoreau.
By the way, Radley. I notice you’ve never bothered to pay me for any the comments I’ve posted to your comment board over the years.
Expect to hear from my lawyers.
#21 Are you being paid by the word? Although I tend to agree with the gist of what you’re arguing, I have to question your judgement on matters literary. Frey is one of the worst writers I’ve ever had displeasure of reading whether it be a novel or biography. He essientially padded that piece of shit by continuously repeating words, phrases, sentences,sentences, phrases, words through the whole damn book. A hoary contrivance, a contrivance of much hoaratude!
Re: #55:
You’re right, I was longwinded, and you have a point on Frey’s repetitive style. I also wouldn’t have minded some quotation marks for dialogue in “Bright Shiny Morning.” Still, despite the stylistic tics, I think it was very well done on the whole.
Maybe I stretched the Denny’s analogy a bit. It’s true that there’s a much higher potential return on investment for writers and musicians than for line cooks.
That said, the ROI for creative pursuits is only potential. The failure rates are stratospheric. The recording and publishing industries are notoriously capricious, with success often determined by connections and bribes, not talent. They’re great places for shysters to take advantage of the starry-eyed and the gullible. So I’m all for little guys fighting back if and when they realize that they’ve been fleeced.
Arguments about free will and laissez-faire idealism are fine for libertarian fantasy lands, but they’re misleading in the real world. They provide great cover for rapacious bosses, con artists and neofeudalists.
Governments do have a place stopping people from volunteering at Denny’s or Ford. Such arrangements are frauds on the gullible or desperate. Likewise for-profit diploma mills. Students can rationally consent to study at such institutions, but they’re frauds, and it’s time for the authorities to turn the screws.
I’d have more sympathy for HuffPo had it been a scrappy upstart vying for a place in the blogging free-for-all. It never was. Arianna Huffington started out as a shrewd, very well connected media star. She was able to command publicity that was out of the question for most bloggers. As far as I’m concerned, it’s despicable for someone in her position to use unpaid labor for a business venture. If she had trouble meeting payroll with cash flow, she should have invested more of her own cash or gone to the capital markets. That’s what ethical entrepreneurs do.
Re: #38:
That’s another data point for my thesis that nightclubs are the province of creepy sleazeballs, and the more adult-themed, the creepier.
Legalized prostitution might do something to crowd creeps out of the adult market. It would at least allow streetwalkers and madams to come out of the shadows and show that they have more class than the clubbing set.
Qwints:
“In the vast majority of public corporations, the owners (i.e. shareholders) have very little to do with business operations.”
True. Except voting for the management, which is the point I was making.
“…CEO pay had little effect on shareholder value.”
I dont recall mentioning pay. A paycheck doesn’t put talented people together. If talented people just got together on their own (and direct themselves well), we wouldn’t need CEOs.
No, they are moral statements about what is right and wrong.
You’re arguing that people should only do the right thing in fantasy lands, which is a rotten approach to dealing with other people.
I think the “band” analogy jumped off track. Let’s change it to something a little more realistic. Your band makes a bunch of demo CDs. But your band, like most bands, suck. You’re trying to make gravy so you start giving some of your CDs away as promos.
There’s a record store that doesn’t do consignment but they’ll throw a promo disk in for free with purchases their customers make if you’re going to give the disks away for free. The other bands make the draw to the music store, you ride the coat tails in hope of pushing your crappy little band up above the “just visible in .” It beats having to stand around out in the middle of winter outside dive bars trying to get your music into the hands of people who don’t really care.
The record store does great business. And one day, the store owner decides to sell the joint. You get a bug up your @ss because his success was, in part, by your own deluded method of logic, due to your free promos. So you decide to sue the store owner.
@Andrew Roth
Of course, the RoI is supposed to be potential. That’s the point, isn’t it? There are clear market signals to would-be writers that is going to be a long row to hoe, yet still they come, by the droves. They HAVE TO get minimal remuneration. Again, very simple economics. It’s actually a joke among my writerly friends that they’re going to be baristas for the rest of their lives. They know what they’re getting into, and god bless them. Let them try.
You mention fantasies, idealism, and such, but you’re the one levying normative statements against institutions that you happen to disagree with and wishing for some benevolent(?!) governmental power to step in and do the right thing.
As a slight aside, capitalism is like life, it’s a profit and loss system. Profit encourages risk-taking, and loss encourages prudence. You have to have both to have a working capitalist economy, just as you have to have both for a well-lived life.
*leveling normative statements
Not levying
*Life is like capitalism
Not “capitalism is like life”
I wish I had one of my writer friends to proofread my blog comments
Sean,
The owners don’t vote for management in corporations, they vote for the board of directors. Such boards rarely perform significant work or undertake significant risk in major public corporations beyond selecting management. The point I was making about CEO pay was to suggest that boards of directors are not particularly good about choosing CEOs. (If they were, the more highly compensated CEOs would produce more value.)
#45, Technically, extortion very often involves a threat of violence (veiled or not so veiled); the classic case is the protection racket, where gangsters offer to “protect” you, for a fee, primarily from their own vandalism and violence (like a miniature government!). The example you described was blackmail, a form of extortion involving threats to one’s reputation or relationships rather than threats of (direct) physical harm.
Radley:
If you merely played the songs the singer wrote, you deserve compensation for those gigs, but I’m not sure why you think you should be compensated if then plays those same songs with another band.
Sorry, I meant that one way for the singer to stop using my work would be by re-recording it. Grammatically ambiguous – we’re saying the same thing.
In the case of the HuffPo, it appears that they are still technically making money off these authors’ work – it still appears in their archives, with associated advertising material. It would seem reasonable that, if these authors aren’t getting paid for the value their work creates, they could ask for it to be taken down.
The material could then be re-written if HuffPo could find anyone to do it. That would be analogous to re-recording the song using a new band line-up.
Does HuffPo do this? Or are they in the position of the singer who insists on selling work that the guitarist helped produce, without compensating the guitarist?
@Corkscrew: Ordinarily, a contract would specify what the terms are, but I’m not sure that there’s a contract at all here, let alone a legally enforceable one. However, I suspect HuffPo would make an argument that by submitting work to them, and pressing “I agree” to their terms and conditions, means that you gave them a license to print them in perpetuity.
Whether publicity is enough of a recompense for this to count as a contract, I’m not sure.