Employers start demanding copyrights and eliminate residual payments. Another, more direct, assault against freelance income is the no-compete clause. In my case, when ClickZ was acquired by Internet. Com I immediately lost my weekly column on Andover. Andover competes with Internet.
Freelancers are the canaries in the mineshaft for full-time employees.
We're very sensitive to changes in market conditions. When we start coughing, check your medicine chest. There's a reason you haven't seen many links to Amazon books or records in this column lately. As I wrote in ClickZ recently, Amazon has chosen to hose all its users, claiming the same ownership of private data as spammers do. Amazon's aggressive policy goes far beyond that, however, as The Register revealed recently .