A federal judge has ruled in favor of two student interns who worked on the set of the movie “Black Swan.” The judge said Fox Searchlight Pictures should have paid the interns for their work, since it had no apparent educational value. The internships consisted of “basic chores, usually undertaken by paid employees. The interns took lunch orders, answered phones, arranged other employees’ travel plans, tracked purchase orders, took out the trash and assembled office furniture.”

This ruling has wide-reaching ramifications for countless companies that take advantage of free student labor each summer by way of unpaid internships. Undergraduates work more than a million internships in the U.S. each year. About half are unpaid, and a great many in that latter category consist of rather menial work.

The student internship has become a rite of passage for most young professionals as they seek to transition from college to the workplace. Many consider it an unavoidable tradeoff — you agree to work for free in hopes that you will get valuable “experience” to add to your resume, leading ultimately to that ever-so-crucial first job. If this ruling stands, it could dramatically reshape the way companies utilize interns.

If you look at it from a practical perspective, it’s true that there is often little educational value in student internships. Often, it’s simply a case of a company taking advantage of available free labor. On the other hand, to take a more philosophical view, one could argue that unpaid internships have a historical precedent in the classic apprenticeship model common for many centuries among young boys seeking to learn a skilled trade.

Personally, I’d say that if students enter these unpaid positions voluntarily, what moral grounds do they then have to demand payment after the fact? No one forced them to take the job. But still, I’ll admit that I dislike the fact that so many companies treat students like an endless pool of free labor, taking advantage of students’ desperate resumé building in order to get them to do meaningless work.

This is an important ruling. Much is at stake. And the economic impact could be huge.

Above all, one single question haunts the minds of office managers everywhere, facing the prospect of a world without unpaid interns: Who is going to make the coffee?