[MUD-Dev] AOL lawsuit (was text parsing)

[Koster]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Matthew Mihaly [mailto:diablo at best.com]
> Sent: Tuesday, June 08, 1999 4:50 PM
> To: mud-dev at kanga.nu
> Subject: Re: [MUD-Dev] Text Parsing
> 
> 
> On Tue, 8 Jun 1999, Greg Miller wrote:

> > Speaking of which, I assume everyone's heard about the AOL 
> lawsuit...
> > Are you worried about being sued (assuming the credits aren't worth
> > minimum wage, I'd have to worry about the fallout, at least 
> for those of
> > us accepting money and operating inside the US)?
> 
> I haven't actually. Could you elaborate? That's potentially 
> fairly serious
> for a number of pay games if I understand the gist of what 
> you are saying.
> (Achaea, Simutronics, and Avalon, at least, all have people 
> doing 'work'
> who don't get paid the equivalent of minimum wage).

The lawsuit is by a group of former AOL volunteers who are suing alleging
that their volunteer work for AOL constituted de facto employment because of
the requirement to maintain certain hours, the presence of a contract
detailing responsibilities, and various other things. Yes, it has serious
implications for the volunteer forces of all sorts of games, industries,
etc. Our legal dept is watching it, but right now, nobody appears too
concerned. Apparently a large part of the problem was that AOL used to
compensate with free time back when they were hourly, and never changed when
they went flat-rate, so volunteers ended up with far less compensation
without corresponding changes in the contract, etc. There has been some
media coverage of it, but I don't have time to look it up just now.



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