Recently, Harvard Business School professor Mary Tripsas was fired from her column in the New York Times for accepting an all-expenses paid trip to 3M’s customer innovation center, then writing about it in a favorable light without disclosing to her editor who paid for the trip.

Many of the blogs commenting on it seem to focus on how ridiculous the Times’s standards are, how the piece was a puff piece, etc. They’re missing the main point. As public editor Clark Hoyt discusses in his column, Tripsas and others clearly violated the terms of their contracts. It’s appalling how frequently this happens.

I have a great deal of sympathy for freelancers who are trying to meet the obligations of contracts for an array of publications. Few are easy to read and decipher. Most are unnecessarily long and filled with legal jargon. However, keeping all the contract requirements from different publications straight is one of the responsibilities of a freelancer. Many freelancers feign ignorance or actively flout the contract rules simply because they know that the worst that will happen is that the publication won’t use them again.*

But this is a legally binding contract. Just this last year, I had a writer sell parts of a story that my magazine paid for (and paid travel and other expenses for) to two other publications–or at least, two others that I found. Wait, no. Three other publications. We bought exclusive worldwide rights for the first four months after publication in our magazine. I will never hire that writer again.

The Runner’s World/Newsweek/Sarah Palin photo shoot situation is another version of this same issue. You think that you get what you pay for. Except when the person who you pay decides to ignore the terms of the payment.

Once a writer signs a contract, he or she has agreed to the rules of the game. If you don’t like the rules, don’t sign the contract, or at least discuss it with your editor. (Often, there is some leeway.) Though some of the writers Hoyt mentions felt squeamish or had concerns, none of them actually discussed these concerns with their editor.

*There are many reasons for this. First off, legal battles are expensive and neither publications nor freelancers have much cash to spare. Second, a publication that sues its writers is going to have a far more difficult time finding writers. But as publishers shed titles on an almost weekly basis, these writers are putting short-term gains in front of long-term potential. Editors continue working with reliable, ethical writers.