We covered the story of a federal judge ruling that the unpaid interns who sued Fox Searchlight Pictures were in fact entitled to wages.

And while there has been conjecture that this case is the beginning of the end for unpaid internships, academic officials disagree.

…[O]mitted from much of the discussion was a small but crucial fact: the two interns who filed the seemingly groundbreaking lawsuit were not students. They were 40-something men who’d left their jobs to try their hands at film production — and they were not so much interns as they were volunteers, college officials say.

“They were employees,” Robert Shindell, vice president and chief learning officer of the research and consulting firm Intern Bridge, wrote on his blog. “That’s how the judge ruled it — and I think he got it right.”

The U.S. District Court’s ruling in the “Black Swan case,” dubbed for the film on which the interns worked, gave a boost to the already intensifying legal movement against unpaid internships. Since the ruling, former interns have sued Atlantic Records, Gawker and its publisher Nick Denton, Conde Nast, and the production company that owns the television station Nickelodeon. A previously filed suit against Hearst is making its way through the courts, as are ones against Elite Model Management and numerous others. A lawsuit against the Charlie Rose Show ended in a settlement last year.

But the Black Swan case is the first clear victory for the unpaid intern lobby – and it’s causing a headache for experts who say people are conflating those “volunteer” positions with the truly educational internships (at least in theory) that colleges help arrange for their students.

“With a true academic internship, there is a built-in accountability between the institution of higher education, the employer and the student,” said Michael True, director of the internship center at Messiah College. “There are nonprofit organizations that can hardly afford to pay their own staff, much less pay an intern. But they get a great experience and the students who are able to do it participate in those and benefit from them.”

In another case heralded as a victory for unpaid interns, a 2011 Pennsylvania State University graduate settled her lawsuit against the fashion designer Norma Kamali. The internship she sued over, however, is one she began in December 2012 (long after she graduated).

In other words, the cases where the interns are making headway in court are the ones where colleges are removed from the process.

“The definition of intern always includes the word student or academic or some form of these two things,” Shindell said in an interview. “[Black Swan] is an employee law case — plain and simple — it has nothing to do with internships. But because they added in those words, all of a sudden everybody’s up in arms about it.”