There’s an interesting interview here about a lawsuit against Origin Systems by people who volunteered to do various things on Ultima Online. This is a derivative of the lawsuit against AOL by volunteers on that system.
In a persistent online role playing game like UO, typically there are going to be hardcore users who are going to play the game an unbelievable amount of time and are going to be helping newbies out with their problems as a matter of course. In the past, typically a company will have some sort of program so such people can have a more formal position within the game and in return typically give deep discounts or even provide service free to these folks.
With the AOL lawsuit and now the Origins lawsuit, however, the claim is being made that it is illegal to volunteer at a for-profit enterprise, period. If I tell Origin, hey I’m going to be playing your game 20 hours a week anyway, why not tell newbies they can seek me out for help and in return give me a discount on the game? According to this lawsuit, such agreements constitute a crime.
This is a good example of the New Economy meeting the old, rigid legal structure, and a lot of small and medium sized web sites are exposing themselves to liability because of it. One place I see this a lot is volunteers acting as moderators on discussion forums for small, but definitely commercial, web sites. On several of the web sites I run I’d constantly get e-mail saying, “User XX is out of control, why not appoint me or someone else as a moderator so we can deal with these problems when you’re busy with other things?” I’d love to, but since my sites are all commercial, that’s just a lawsuit waiting to happen.
I’m similarly concerned about people who write me wanting me to put their article on my web site. Most of the articles are very good, but I suspect that if I don’t compensate the author I’m also violating any number of laws regarding minimum wage.
You have to wonder how far this will can be taken, especially given the Open Source community ethos. It isn’t too much of a stretch from saying that it is illegal for me to volunteer for Origin to saying that if Red Hat can’t incorporate Open Source code I’ve written into their Linux package without compensating me, regardless of whether or not I want to be compensated.
Don’t think such lawsuits can’t reverberate. The lawsuits by Microsoft temps, who agreed to a contract when they were hired but then sued saying it wasn’t enough, is really changing the world of freelance journalism. I used to write for a couple papers with a pretty clear understanding — they had first time North American rights to my work, but I retained the copyright. Then several lawsuits involving temps came along and all of the newspapers I wrote for now wanted me to sign work-for-hire contracts, which I was unwilling to do.
Such lawsuits certainly provide a short term economic benefit to lawyers, and occasionally the plaintiffs suing, but in the long term they tend to have far reaching negative consequences that limit the sort of agreements that individuals can enter into and the sort of business models that can prevail on the Internet and in the real world.