Social media has made it much easier for companies to tap into the crowd for everything from Wikipedia entries, to serial thrillers, and even Super Bowl ads—but at what point does soliciting user-generated content cross the line from being a cool marketing tactic, to exploitation?

Perhaps it’s when the company asks professionals—not amateurs—to volunteer to do something that they’d ordinarily be paid for (and something that will ultimately make the company much richer in the process). That seems to be the case with LinkedIn, which recently surveyed a group of users to see if they’d be interested in translating its content, for free. And the NYT reports that about 300 of the translators responded with a big, fat “no”—arguing that LinkedIn was trying to exploit them.

Users can currently access LinkedIn in English, Spanish, French and German; the company figured it made sense to ask the translators within its network whether they’d be interested in helping to add more languages to the list. Out of roughly 12,000 responses, nearly half (45 percent) of the users said they’d help translate in exchange for a premium account upgrade—the most popular form of “compensation.” But 29 percent also chose to write in their own trade-off, and Product Manager Nic Posner noted that the majority of those responses were requests for actual pay. Posner also responded directly to the disgruntled users in a forum post (group membership required), noting that LinkedIn was just soliciting ideas about translation—not volunteers—at this time.

Still, some translators felt that LinkedIn was disrespecting them by assuming they’d want to work for free (there’s even a #LinkedInfail tag on Twitter, now); others said they thought it would be a great opportunity. The NYT notes that the a similar debate arose when Facebook asked volunteers to translate parts of its site in 2007, and most recently when Google (NSDQ: GOOG) asked illustrators to provide free artwork to help hype Chrome.

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