SYS-CON - “unethical money grabbers?”

Paul Mutton of jibbler.org had a bad experience with Sys-Con. Not only they didn’t remunerate him (as per agreement) they also didn’t provide him with free copies as promised. Then they went ahead to sell his article for 5.95 USD over Amazon. As of this writing however Sys-Con appears to have withdrawn the articles from Amazon.com.

In his own words:

A couple of years ago, I wrote an article to appear in one of their magazines called Java Developers Journal. If you don’t know what this is, just imagine a magazine stuffed full of advertising and very little actual content and you’re not far off the mark. I knew at the time that I was doing this free of charge, but was promised a few copies of the magazine when my article was published.

My article got published, but I did not receive a single copy of the magazine. I reminded them about this and was told that they had not printed enough copies. Oh well, there’s gratitude for you. Any idea what it’s like to contribute several pages of writing to a publication and to never actually see it in print? It sucks. To this day I have still not seen a paper copy of my article. In fact, I have never seen a single copy of Java Developers Journal in my life.

This had all blown over months ago, until I noticed something the other day that I just could not believe. They were selling my article on Amazon for $5.95 a pop! Perhaps they were not content with the amount of money they made by cramming adverts into every page of my article. What a bloody cheek. And what do I get out of this? Absolutely nothing, as usual.

Source: Jibbler

I feel bad for him. Anyone else with experience writing for SysCon - good or bad?