At the moment, I’m blogging more for a hobby and only concentrating on my soccer blog, although I have two other blogs to managed.

And…who knows I can get many attention from blog readers so they will get to know Newcastle United better and be a Toon Army as the result from reading my blog ;-)

I’ve licensed my blog under a Creative Commons Share-Alike License, which basically allows anyone, even commercially, to copy, reuse and make derivatives works of my blog, so long as they attribute me, and apply the same license to the copies. In effect, the BlogBurst agreement seems compatible with this. I’m not blogging to make money; that never crossed my mind. I won’t run Adsense as I don’t want to distract readers or make them wonder about my motivation for blogging. So their explicit statement that they’re not promising me a dime doesn’t bother me. I’m not going to hawk my blog around news vendors by myself, so this service seems to be doing me a favour!

One of the major criticisms was that they can continue using the content you provided to them forever. I think they must have been listening, as when I just checked the wording of the agreement (http://www.blogburst.com/blogger/agreement.html) the wording about Termination now reads: “In the event that this Agreement is terminated for any reason, the terms and conditions of this Agreement shall survive termination for Works provided to Pluck prior to the date of termination for a period of time no longer than one (1) year”. So they can continue using the content for 1 year, not forever.

cheers,

Vincenze.

So while BlogBurst lasts — and if they change their model to a reputable and fair one, paying a fair royalty, and including a reasonable reversion of rights clause in their contract, and otherwise cleaning up their act, fine, more power to them — it will only be providing the work of people who don’t know any better. This won’t, overall, help BlogBurst sell their package.

And when newspaper clients start learning that BlogBurst isn’t paying their writers, and has asked for rights “in perpetuity,” they’re apt to start dropping their contracts with BlogBurst, since the publicity of working with such an unethical outfit won’t be good for them.

And BlogBurst will either change to a reputable model, or have absconded somewhere with the profits, leaving an empty office behind in Austin.

So in the long run, either they’ll clean up their act, and you can wait till then, or you’ll lose anyway. Just something to keep in mind.

Beyond what I wrote here, see also what many others are saying here. Don’t take my word for it. Check it out.

“you grant to Pluck and its affiliates a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual license to reproduce, distribute, make derivative works of, perform, display, disclose, and otherwise dispose of the Work (and derivative works thereof) for the purposes of (a) modifying the Work without substantially changing its original meaning, and (b) distributing the Work (and derivative works thereof) to Publisher electronic web sites or corresponding printed editions, whether now known or hereafter devised.”

“royalty-free, perpetual license”

You get no money: forever. And if they actually do publish your stuff, you can’t sell it elsewhere. It doesn’t matter that it’s a “non-exclusive” right, because in practice, no one else is going to pay you to buy your words and sell them to newspapers if this outfit is already do it while paying you nothing.

If your work is worth buying, and being published by newspapers, it’s worth your being paid for it. Anyone who tells you otherwise is conning you. Don’t let eagerness to be in print and inexperience blind you.

Moreover, if you think you’re going to get many hits back when your work is being published in full elsewhere, you’re completely fooling yourself. The only “exposure” here is your words being published for free by people making money off you. If you want links back to your blogs, even, insist that Blogburst only publish the first few paragraphs of your posts and require that the rest can only be read via the link back to your blog.

But they won’t agree. Regardless, you should still be paid, since they’re being paid. (You think the person you’ve corresponded with, who is paid to be charming and friendly and suck you in, is also working for free? Ha!)

I don’t say this out of any animus for anyone at BlogBurst. I say this because I’ve worked in publishing for thirty years, and seen innumerable scams like this, and how eager people are to fall for them, due to the normal desire to see one’s name in print and as widespread as possible. That’s how cons work: they take advantage of normal desires.

No, I’m referring to the fact that forever after, for the next ten thousand years, BlogBurst owns the rights to publish your words, no matter that you’ve since opted out of dealing with them.

No professional writer in their right mind would ever sign a “perpetual” clause. Ask anyone who has ever sold a word for a living, or even as a hobby, or any professional editor, or anyone in publishing. It’s completely unethical to ask for such a thing.

Rights are something one licenses for a limited term, with specific language about the rights reverting back to the author within a defined and limited time-span, and this automatically happens. Any other method is considered utterly unethical in publishing, and only a con-artist would ask for anything else.

Morever, you’ve specifically agreed that you’ll never be entitled to any money: “You acknowledge and agree that you are not entering into this Agreement with the expectation of any payment and you are entering into this Agreement solely in exchange for the benefits set forth in Section 3 above.”

That they tell you otherwise doesn’t matter: the above is the legal contract that you’ve signed. That’s all that matters.

And this is again completely unethical. The entire concept of a “royalty” was invented as an alternative to a flat payment that a publishing company might not have the cash flow to give upfront. Instead, a royalty is a fixed percentage of the profits. BlogBurst asks you to sign away all your rights “in perpetuity” in return for nothing, and their excuse is that they don’t have the money upfront. Only the ignorant and hopeful naive will fall for that. They’re being paid by the newspapers. Since you supply the content, you deserve a share. If they’re not being paid, BlogBurst still has no problem in not giving you your rightful royalty, since they’d not have to pay you anything.

That they are unwilling to give a royalty, and specifically make you sign away any obligation to ever be paid, they are stealing from you, and taking advantage of your ignorance of standard publishing practices for well over a century.

That people are eager to see their name in print is precisely the hook on which con men over the past century have taken advantage of such eagerness, naivety, and ignorance, to con people out of their rights in return for nothing. And that’s precisely what BlogBurst is doing: waving a promise of “exposure” in front of you, and you think it sounds great, and you sign away all rights for nothing, and now no one else will ever want to buy those rights from you. Ever. For your entire life. And the lives of your survivors.

Talk to anyone with the faintest experience in professional publishing; you’ve been conned.

you get exposure

you retain credit for your work

your site is linked, so if people like what they read and they may want more, they can easily get to it

and Gary, I very briefly read the terms and cond. … I thought it was all pretty good, when you say “signing your rights away” are you refering only to potential monetary earnings?

Bottom line, seems great for exposure and credit…as for the whole ad/money thing, if you’re making enough money, so that losing a percentage would be substantial, then you probably never needed a service like Blogburst in the first place.

more of my take on it here.

cheers,

Vincenze.

The point seems to be being missed by most of the commenters here. You’re irrevocably signing away all rights, in perpetuity, to the content you’ve provided here. And you specifically waive all rights to future payment, and acknowledge that none is promised. No reputable publisher would ask such a thing.

They’re selling your work upfront; no reputable publisher would not give a royalty for that. And none would not have a reversion clause.

BlogBurst sounds like a pretty cool idea. It finds blogs that are filled with interesting and informative content (like this one apparently!), and then finds major media outlets to broadcast that content, giving the participating blogs much greater vis…

It is an interesting proposition. I’ll report back on what happens next.

Your blog, your content and your name are yours alone. There are some licensing terms you have to agree to when signing up for this opt-in service in order for your content to be displayed on partner sites, but no one has the right to change your posts, nor are your posts available for use outside of the purpose of the BlogBurst network. The BlogBurst network focuses on blog and blog post selection by publishers and filtering capabilities to find the posts on the topics that matter most to their audiences.

and

BlogBurst tracks your blog’s presence on any publisher partner’s site including all headline views, post views and referrals back to your site. You can use the online BlogBurst blogger work bench to track your blog’s success across the network.