Sunday, September 30, 2007

[blogburst] and other remunerative schemes

Would you trust this man?

Longrider draws our attention to a worrying scheme:

If you are a blogger who is keen on getting more exposure, then you may well be interested … On the downside, some of the early criticisms still stand. The first is remuneration.

Intellectual property rights is next in the licensing scheme:

… you grant to Pluck and its affiliates a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, license to reproduce, distribute, make derivative works of, perform, display and disclose the Work …

Little bloggers, for whom this post is intended, are not into this stuff and may not fully understand it. They might see $1500 and think how good that looks. My comment at Longrider's was:

This needs to be read carefully. On the face of it, it’s a good idea but signing away intellectual property rights is self-actualizing, as they know.

If you’re not much chop as a blogger, it won’t matter all that much but if you are good, then you’ll get exposure and you’ve signed to them so they reap the benefit without any legal obligation to remunerate.

In short, it’s a wnak [excuse my French].

3 comments:

  1. Thanks for the link and I think this one is worth drawing peoples' attention to. It was all over the US blogosphere a year or so ago and the links I provided are well worth a read even though Pluck have since addressed some of the concerns raised at that time.

    They are now expanding into the UK, Europe and Asia, so you may get an approach from Eric, their recruiter, who will tell you how good your blog is and how much of an asset it will be to their programme. This is classic ego stroking stuff, so resist the temptation to be flattered and read the T&Cs very critically before signing up to anything.

    Something to bear in mind; you have something they want; your content. They want it to sell on and with no guaranteed payment to you, yet they make a profit from it. Surely sharing some of that profit with the content generator is the ethical thing to do? I don't know about you, but I don't work for nothng - or the promise of maybe something at some indeterminate time in the future.

    You get the possibility of some payment and more exposure in return for signing away the rights to your material. Ask yourself; who stands to gain from this relationship?

    And, they are knocking on your door, you are not knocking on theirs... Like the door to door salesman, it ain't charity they are offering.

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  2. "It ain't charity they're offering". No indeed.

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  3. Yes, I could see how people might fall for this one. you are right to warn.

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