darrelplant.com

Today is the first anniversary of a business transaction that’s likely to haunt me for a while, as well as a milepost on an economic road that seems to have a lot of potholes.

In the middle of last winter, I got a call from a local multimedia company with which I was well-acquainted. In fact, it was the first place I’d applied for a job in the multimedia business back when I first got involved with Director, although they didn’t hire me. But I got to know some of the principles back in the pre-Internet era, when I worked on the newsletter for the Oregon chapter of the International Interactive Communication Society (long defunct) and one of the company’s co-owners was the president of the chapter (later, things got so bad that I was the president of the chapter, but that’s another story).

In following years, I did a couple of subcontracting projects with them, most notably a series of Shockwave3D articles for Intel’s Game Developer site. Never a problem working with them, never a problem getting paid.

So it was without any trepidation that I agreed to do some Flash work for them last February when one of their developers left, signed the contract, worked in their office, etc. As called for in the contract, I invoiced at the end of the month, which meant a smallish invoice for February, then a good deal larger for March (which was dated 1 April 2008). Payment was 30 days from invoice, so even though I hadn’t gotten a check for my 1 March invoice by the time I wrote out the 1 April invoice, I wasn’t concerned; I had six weeks of solid work under my belt with a company I’d done plenty of business with in the past. And even after another week had gone by, when I was asked to make a few minor changes just after getting back from a trip to Phladelphia and getting the smart car, I didn’t have any compunctions about it. That is, until the company principles pulled me aside after I’d made the changes and said that they couldn’t pay my invoices.

And that’s where the saga gets unpleasant. It’s not as if I’ve been swimming in work for the past couple of years, so there’s no guarantee that if I hadn’t taken the project at Planet Productions that I would have been earning any money during that period, but it’s possible. What really torques me off about it though is that there’s no way they didn’t know weeks before that they weren’t even going to be able to pay my invoice from work for February, which was less than a third the amount of the invoice for March’s work.

The first payment I got covered my 1 March invoice. I got it in October. A month later I got about a third of the amount on my 1 April invoice. It’s been nearly five months since I saw anything. So far, about 47% of the total amount I invoiced has been paid. Today’s the anniversary of the largest of the three invoices.

April Fool.

One of the last articles I was ever asked to write — and definitely the last I wrote for a print publication or on Director — was for the MX Developers Journal. The incomparable James Newton was working as an “unofficial/unpaid editor” on Director-related material approached me about writing something for them, and I just happened to have finished a fairly simple kiosk — but one with live video feeds — for the Oregon Zoo that I thought was a project that could be digested in a few thousand words.

By the summer of 2004, the days of getting paid to write material on Director were already long ago and gone, despite the MX Developers Journal‘s glossy paper and four-color printing, so apart from the few copies of the magazine that I received (only after whining to the in-house editorial contact at Sys-Con the publisher, which in itself completed a circle with my first experience in magazine publishing, 30 years ago next month). I never expected any payment for the article.

Then again, I never expected anything like this, either. WHile MXDJ died long ago, Sys-Con has continued publishing online journals and sponsoring seminars. Apparently, the company launched a site called Ulitzer.com a couple of years ago, and some of the authors like Aral Balkan — a London Flash developer of some note — are just hearing about it for the first time

Apparently, some 6,000 authors who have written content for Sys-Con publications in the past are now having their work reprinted (unpaid) at Ulitzer, at subdomains personalized with their names. Moreover, no attempt appears to have been made to contact the authors to notify them that this was going to happen. Balkan was told — when he questioned being identified as a “Ulitzer author” that he could modify his biography and even apply for Google AdSense dollars generated by his pages on the site to be sent to him, but unless an author had been notified that the site existed and that this was a possibility, then presumably Sys-Con would have gone on collecting all monies from SAP, Microsoft, Symantec, and the other companies that placed ads on the site.

After complaining about Sys-Con’s practices (and getting his articles and name pulled from the Ulitzer site, for which he gave them credit, Balkan then found that Sys-Con had written calling him a homosexual and comparing him to the attempted assassin of Pope John Paul. It’s truly an incredible story that’s nowhere near over yet I feel, but Sys-Con’s actions reminded me an awful lot of someone I’d encountered before.

And just look at my personalized site on Ulitzer! Apparently I’m such an insignificant cog in their rip-off machine that they can’t be bothered to spell my last name right (see the subdomain name under the Ulitzer logo).