As long as an internship is tied to education and interns benefit more than the employer from the arrangement, companies don’t have to pay them, a U.S. appeals court stated Thursday.

This decision reversed a 2013 win for former interns Alex Footman and Eric Glatt, who sued Fox Searchlight for violating labor and overtime laws while they worked for free on the Natalie Portman film Black Swan.

A panel of judges in the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals found the initial ruling’s reasoning, which looked to six criteria presented by the Labor Department, too limiting. The federal judge determined that Footman and Glatt’s duties—including accounting, buying a nonallergenic pillow for the film’s director, and making photocopies—rendered them the equivalent of unpaid employees and entitled to minimum wage.

The appellate court instead favored Fox’s set of standards to define a worthy internship.

“We agree with the defendants that the proper question is whether the intern or the employer is the primary beneficiary of the relationship,” reads the appeals opinion.

The new opinion also makes a class-action suit—of which Glatt, Footman, and an additional plaintiff were part of as well—virtually impossible, as it lists a “non-exhaustive set of considerations” and states that the validity of internships should be decided on a case-by-case basis.

For two short years, unpaid internships seemed to be a thing of the past as Footman and Glatt’s initial win began a trend of class-action lawsuits by former interns against major companies such Condé Nast, Warner Music Group, NBCUniversal, and Viacom—many of which settled out of court. Creating a gray area and preventing interns from grouping together to bring suit means those trying to break into the business have little recourse if they are indeed mistreated. Taking a case to court alone is no easy task, and the prospect of little financial return from one plaintiff is unappealing to most lawyers, a problem Glatt himself faced, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

So, Why Should You Care? With the national student loan debt at an all-time high of $1.2 trillion, many students and recent graduates simply can’t afford to work for free after college. Unpaid internships are not only detrimental to the potentially exploited worker but also to the typically paid positions they replace.

Internships can undoubtedly be a great experience are and often a foot in the door to future opportunities. However, as many former interns will attest, they’re often overworked and forced to perform grunt work so the company doesn’t have to pay an assistant, a messenger, or a janitor.

This case will be sent back to the lower courts to decide whether Footman and Glatt’s internships were primarily educational. What exactly is educational about buying fancy bedding is yet to be determined.