A Proposal For Unionizing Bloggers 259
mikesd81 writes "Coloumbia Journal Review writes about the possibility of unionizing bloggers. Chris Mooney writes 'Yes, dear reader: the Bloggers Guild of America may be on its way. The dispute between screen and television writers and media conglomerates has its roots, after all, in the Web.' He says, then, they get zero compensation for their products being distributed over the Internet. 'Bloggers often earn that same salary. There are exceptions, of course, those fortunate few who have become quasi-celebrities in their own right and found themselves, and their sites, snatched up by major media companies,' he goes on to say. He also adds that a bloggers guild could protect a blogger's intellectual property and help ensure they're compensated for it."
What about scientists? (Score:4, Interesting)
Also, scientists generally contribute far more intellectual energy to submitting their publications and they aren't paid for it either (although it is considered somewhat of a job expectation). As for protecting their IP, their articles generally cease being their own IP once a journal gets ahold of it, upon which it controls distribution and very often ransoms access to the public, making a profit for the journals - but not the scientists who wrote the paper. I think researchers may need to unionize earlier than bloggers if abuse of IP is what you're concerned about.
Re:Just what we need (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Unionizing (Score:5, Interesting)
Incidentally:
http://membership.acs.org/W/WNY/db2005/db0305.html [acs.org]
'Since I know the chemical profession best, I devised two questions, for instance, to tell a chemist from a nonchemist. Here they are:
(1) How do you pronounce UNIONIZED?
(2) What is a mole?
In response to the first question, the nonchemist is bound to say "YOO-yun-ized," which is the logical pronunciation, and the dictionary pronunciation, too. The chemist, however, would never think of such a thing; he would say without a moment's hesitation: "un- EYE -on-ized."
In response to the second question, the nonchemist is bound to say, "A little furry animal that burrows underground," unless he is a civil engineer who will say, "A breakwater." A chemist, on the other hand, will clear his throat, and say, "Well, it's like this -" and keep talking for hours.
There's my cue. Shall we talk about the chemical version of the little furry animal?"
~~"To Tell a Chemist" Isaac Asimov 1965'
Re:Not too surprising (Score:3, Interesting)
I question the whole idea that people have an inherent right to be paid when something they did turns out to have value because of the efforts of someone else. A great actor can stand on the street corner acting all day and might make a few bucks from passersby. If other people put that acting on film, distribute it to thousands of theaters and advertise it, THEN it becomes worth a lot of money, but only as a component of that whole package.
People doing any kind of creative work owe it to themselves to decide how they want to market their work. Do they want to sell it outright and let go of it, do they want to license it out, do they want to go through all the hassle of self-producing it so they have total control and keep all the profits, or what? Nobody is chained to a keyboard. But once they make that decision they shouldn't come back later and complain.
Re:No surprise there (Score:4, Interesting)
Bloggers are just more expressive versions of regular people (excluding of course the marketdroid ass hats who are in it only for the money), either their writing is of interest and a lot of people read it or it doesn't draw much attention beyond their particular local and remote group of friends.
Blogging does represents an interesting balance between expressing your private self and maintaining a level of digital privacy, writing about a subject you are interested in rather than writing about yourself and your family. Perhaps there will be a growth in private blogs housed on localised modem, firewall, router, switch open source web/mail servers. So will people start maintaining two blogs a public and a private blog, none of which they will maintain on data mined and privacy invaded corporate marketdroid servers like blogger, live spaces etc. (eww, data mining not only the blogs, but also readers comments and even who reads the blogs and how long they stay there and how often they return).
Nowdays you also have to wonder how much effect stumbleupon is having upon blog visit statitics. I end up visiting a lot of blogs often return visits to different entries on the same blog, but never by choice, it is just a random stumble event.