Posts tagged: intellectual property

For $10/Hour, You Should Write "Perfect" Copy, and Lots Of It

June 12, 2008, by 18 comments

While they’re only paying $10/hour, this MediaBistro ad tells us Mahalo’s looking for writers who:

Candidates must be excellent writers capable of writing perfect copy at a fast pace. Familiarity with online research, journalism, and wiki markup language are all definite pluses.

It’s always heartwarming to see an American tech company attempting to pay offshore prices for onshore work, but then again, this is hardly new.

To some, “Web 2.0″ is about interactivity and connectedness. To others, it’s a license to profit from the intellectual work product of others, and those leading the rush to trample intellectual property rights are often technology companies.

Will this intellectual property land rush subside? Obviously, not as long as “writers” are willing to work for poverty level wages, or even worse, trading work for “exposure” when that exposure can’t really be translated to a living wage.

There have always been the Users and the Used. Don’t be one of the latter.

Keep writing, Tom Chandler.

(hat tip to Valleywag)

Pay The Damned Writer (A "Getting What Your Worth" Primer With Harlan Ellison)

November 21, 2007, by 4 comments

Done any free work lately? Or seen that work used in multiple places — without ever receiving a dime for the additional uses?

The never-demur Harlan Ellison — a successful, outspoken and abrasive writer — tells it like it is in this short interview. Great stuff — I would have laughed more if so much of it hadn’t been painfully on target.

Ellison still writes on a manual typewriter, and successfully sued movie producer James Cameron after noticing the original Terminator script bore a striking resemblance to two of his own short stories.

He’s fought (viciously) for writer’s rights since the early 1960s, and serves as an excellent counterpoint in the current times, where intellectual property and creator’s rights seem to be going to the way of the Dodo bird.

Bookmark this video, and when you feel yourself edging towards a giveaway — when you’re about to apply a value of “zero” to your work — give it another viewing.

And then read Michel Fortin’s latest “Olympic” pricing post. I wouldn’t apply his approach on all my jobs, but it’s a good example of thinking through the pricing process — namely, what are you really getting paid for, and what does your client know about the process?

Keep writing, Tom Chandler.