{"id":4464,"date":"2014-05-01T12:23:02","date_gmt":"2014-05-01T18:23:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=4464"},"modified":"2014-05-07T14:45:02","modified_gmt":"2014-05-07T20:45:02","slug":"sharecropping-for-coursera","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=4464","title":{"rendered":"Sharecropping for Coursera"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"volunteers\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Coursera, the fast-growing, for-profit online education company, has become, as the Wall Street Journal<\/em> put it<\/a>, “an investor’s pet.” It has pulled in $85 million in venture funding over the last two years, attracting big-name investors like Kleiner Perkins and the World Bank’s VC arm, LearnCapital.<\/p>\n

Those millions aren’t enough, apparently, to pay translators to help the company extend its online courses, or MOOCs, into foreign markets. Instead, Coursera is taking the digital sharecropping<\/a> route. It\u00a0announced<\/a> this week that it is\u00a0recruiting skilled translators and asking them to donate their work\u00a0to the company for free. What the volunteers receive, in lieu of income, is the satisfaction of being a member of Coursera’s “community.” Translation, says<\/a> the company, is “much more than a means to an end. By joining the GTC [Global Translator Community], you\u2019ll become a member of a tight-knit community of committed individuals and organizations.” <\/span><\/p>\n

You’ll also sign a contract<\/a> stating that <\/span><\/p>\n

YOU EXPRESSLY AGREE THAT ANY TRANSLATION SERVICES YOU PROVIDE WILL BE \u00a0DEEMED A “WORK FOR HIRE,” UNDER SECTION 101 OF THE U.S. COPYRIGHT ACT, IN EXCHANGE FOR GOOD AND VALUABLE CONSIDERATION, THE SUFFICIENCY OF WHICH IS ACKNOWLEDGED.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u00a0The work-for-hire provision of the copyright act transfers copyright ownership immediately and irrevocably from the author of a work to the company contracting for the work. Just in case there’s any gray area about the translator’s work-for-hire status, there’s also this clause:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

IF, AND TO THE EXTENT UNDER APPLICABLE LAW, YOU MAY BE \u00a0ENTITLED TO CLAIM OWNERSHIP OVER ANY PART OF THE TRANSLATIONS, THEN YOU HEREBY TRANSFER, GRANT, CONVEY, ASSIGN, AND RELINQUISH EXCLUSIVITY TO COURSERA ALL OF YOUR\u00a0RIGHT, TITLE, AND INTEREST IN AND TO THE TRANSLATIONS PURSUANT TO COPYRIGHT OR ANY OTHER APPLICABLE LAW IN PERPETUITY OR FOR THE LONGEST PERIOD OTHERWISE PERMITTED BY LAW.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Of course, the translator will receive “good and value consideration” \u2014 i.e., membership in the GTC. It’s charity without the charity.<\/p>\n

Geoff Shullenberger puts<\/a> the program into perspective:<\/p>\n

We should not be surprised, but should be troubled, that Coursera is now recruiting\u00a0\u201cvolunteers\u201d to \u201ctranslate top courses into their native languages.\u201d \u00a0Yes, that\u2019s right, a\u00a0for-profit compan<\/em>y, instead of hiring and paying professional translators, is using the rhetoric of volunteerism (\u201ccommunity,\u201d \u201cpartner organizations,\u201d \u201ccontributions\u201d) to obtain that labor for free. \u00a0\u201dWhy translate\u201d for Coursera? \u00a0Because \u201cyou are helping millions of learners who may otherwise struggle to understand courses taught outside their native language.\u201d After all, \u201cvideo subtitle translations can increase course enrollments among speakers of the translated language by up to 200-300%.\u201d \u00a0Oh yes, and that increased enrollment increases the value of our company, and we get to pocket 100% of the additional revenue brought in.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Actually, “digital sharecropping” probably isn’t the best term to describe this particular arrangement. It’s one thing for social networks like Facebook and Twitter to build their businesses on the unpaid contributions of their members. The members are simply socializing, after all, and they’re deriving\u00a0social benefits from their “playbor<\/a>.” In social networks, as I noted in a\u00a02006\u00a0post<\/a>, the sharecroppers operate happily in an attention economy while their overseers operate happily in a cash economy.<\/span>\u00a0Translation is not play; it’s work\u00a0\u2014\u00a0and skilled work at that. What Coursera is doing seems more like plain old chicanery.<\/p>\n

UPDATE: Shullenberger thinks<\/a> we need a new term: “the voluntariat.” It’s the proletariat but without\u00a0the wages.<\/p>\n

Image: San Jose Library<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Coursera, the fast-growing, for-profit online education company, has become, as the Wall Street Journal put it, “an investor’s pet.” It has pulled in $85 million in venture funding over the last two years, attracting big-name investors like Kleiner Perkins and the World Bank’s VC arm, LearnCapital. Those millions aren’t enough, apparently, to pay translators to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4464","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4464","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4464"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4464\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4515,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4464\/revisions\/4515"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4464"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4464"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4464"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}