Or its my inner troll, but the doctors say the pills should kick in soon.

Or to put it another way: if these creators don’t get any share of the revenue from Internet and DVD, why should I respect the corporations’ right to earn revenue from me?

Are you familiar with the concept of astroturf? Not the fake grass kind; I mean paying writers to pretend to be random internet users while they post material favorable to whoever’s paying them.

It’s real, and there’s an increasing amount of it out there, especially on high-traffic sites. Advertising is expensive. Writers are cheap. Astroturf sneaks past our resistance to paid advertising, which makes it very advantageous indeed.

I don’t know how good an ear you have for prose, but an argument someone is framing for the first time sounds different from a variant version knocked out by a writer who’s already written multiple versions of it.

I may be right about BoinkBoink, or I may be wrong. Either way, it’s my job to notice it, and ask.

The writers are the font from which everything else flows. Without good writing, you’ve got nothing. It’s as simple as that. If anyone thinks otherwise it only goes to show that writers are underappreciated.

Cool to know there is an experienced literary knight jousting for Boing’s court. :-)

Thanks for the reply, and in retrospect the argument does seem terribly clean if not practiced and polished. Though I must say I have found those who can do it right the first time, and they scare me a bit.

I did that once to a chunk of astroturf that got posted in a comment thread on my own weblog. Months later, someone who was researching the guy told me that the person who posted that comment was the same one who was outed by Michael Moore for altering the Wikipedia entries on Michael Moore and Sicko, and is a well-known employee of the Heritage Foundation.

You’re confusing writers with employees. They aren’t. They are artists under contract, and they want a new contract. If I’m in the service industry I’m hired to do whatever the company wants. If I’m a show writer it means the show producers think that what I create is worth whatever amount of money my contract says. The difference is in the role I’m supposed to play. As a writer, I’m a (co)creator of the product, while as an employee I’m a parrot of a product already created.

Of course this all relies on knowing the sources and motivations of the participants, and being able to at some level categorize the content. An almost impossible and perhaps self defeating approach to whats here.

Either way its effected the way I look at this medium now. Positively I think….

Again I am all for making sure people get what they deserve, but its funny to see people so blindly side with the WGA as if they have been working for cookies up until this point.

They are lying to someone, is it the writers or the shareholders?

Misleading investors is federal crime:
http://unitedhollywood.blogspot.com/2007/11/misleading-investors-is-federal-crime.html

It is kind of funny, but it’s also understandable. Most of us don’t know the WGA at all, so we give them the benefit of the doubt. We do, however, know enough about the people they’re up against to not give them the benefit of the doubt.

That said, I would welcome some reasoned discussion on the actual terms of the contract proposals under dispute, but I haven’t seen that anywhere (and certainly not here).

The way the “work/employment” system works is you make something or provide some service and then people give you some green backs. It is just that simple. If you suck or your employer runs out of work for you, your ass gets to sit at home in a cold, dark, foodless house ’til your lazy fat ass can get enough energy worked up to find a new job. It is just that simple. This is why I hate writers and photographers. You pay them for a service and then they keep coming back with their nasty little hand out. “Oh you want to sell my plot on a DVD… give me more.” “Oh you want another print of a picture you paid me to take… I want more! You can’t have the negatives and if you scan the picture you paid me to take your ass will be in court.” It does not matter that you already paid them for their services they still think they need more for the entire life of the product?

Where else does this messed up system work? Even in other art fields this system is crap. If you make a painting or a ceramic bowl and sell it the deal is done. You gave them something they gave you something, end of story. If the new owner chooses to photograph it for a book about their collection the artist does not see a dime. Every guest to a museum does not have 4¢ of their visit going to each artist who’s work they placed an eye ball on. This is crap! Total crap!

If this system works then I want every nut tightener and widget maker to be paid once for their work and then again for rest of their life based on the durability and success of said bolt tightening or widget. If you fix a machine, lets say a printing press, do you get paid for every sheet of paper your hard work helped the owner of that machine produce? Hell no! I am a graphic designer, do I get paid every time my ad gets placed in a new publication? You can bet your sweet ass it does not! Does Ford get paid a few extra pennies for every fat ass your Fiesta hauls to Taco Bell? Shit no! Then why do writers and photographers think that after the studios or I pay them for a good or service we do not own that good?

Don’t get me wrong, I am not a flag waver for the money-grubbing, snobbish asshole movie companies I just hate them for a whole different set of reasons. Let me try some logic on you… If writers did not need royalties on every DVD and dish towel based on some line they wrote for some fancy picture show, the cost the DVD could be reduced. Makes sense. Then if the cost of a DVD or a showing of a TV show costs less because the studios are not paying silly royalties they can charge less for the advertising. If the advertising costs less the manufacturers hawking products can sell those products for less and raise worker wages. This all seems logical to me. So I can now conclude the reason people in this country are starving and can not afford food is because over paid writers need to have $5 coffee and royalties on reruns of Sanford and Son.

Just think what all us common folk could afford if those fake-ass actors did not need royalties and million dollar pay checks! Do your job, get paid, go home… shut the hell up.

I just think that a lot of them get mixed up, how tech savvy are the people negotiating this contract, who is consulting them on whats appropriate…. should boing boing ever have its ad revenue sliced into by the WGA for posting a link to a piece of content, or embedding it?….

Just because the fat cats tried to sue youtube for a billion dollars doesn’t mean that they are making a billion dollars….I think everyone agreed way back that youtube pulling clips of the Daily Show sucked….and that the billion dollar lawsuit was completely unfounded. Now the writers are saying “it is worth a billion and we want to get paid every time someone online sees something we’ve written”

no one agreed with that last year. Plus I garauntee every person in this post as at one time or another taken money out of the WGA’s pocket personally….but now that people are lined up against a big bad corporation we side with them immediately.

I think that neither party is all or even half right, and somehow we should all learn a lesson from this….and use linux or something.

Have you ever been an employee? There are certainly jobs where one is paid to be merely a cog in a machine, where creativity is neither required nor, often, desired. But there are plenty of jobs other than ‘writer’ or ‘actor’ or ‘artist’ in which people are hired to create things and where people are hired because the employer thinks what the employee creates is worth the agreed compensation package.
The idea that there’s a sharp line between ‘writer: the art-ist – great force of creativity’ and ‘employee: the mere drone who does what he’s told’ is both silly and insulting.
Don’t get me wrong – I’m with the writers on this one. Given that their standard terms of compensation rely on residuals, they’d be stupid not to demand residuals from online content. The rationale behind the residuals system applies equally well to streaming video. But BoinkBoink is also correct – it’s not a fundamental right of nature (or even a fundamental legal right) that writers get residuals.

Maybe if the only media you pay attention to are ridiculous action movies you could make a claim like this. However, any decent drama, comedy, or talk show, to name a few genres, will be heavily dependent on the writers. Bad costumes or makeup can certainly affect a work’s credibility, but this is really only a possible issue in certain genres (makeup and costume design for the Daily Show can’t be that complex). Good writing, on the other hand, is a linchpin that under-girds everything made. I would dare say that good writing alone can carry a film, and this is generally not the case for costumes, makeup, music score, etc. This is the reason that people enjoy stage plays, which sometimes eliminate all of these secondary qualities as being superfluous. Of course writing is also heavily dependent on acting, but, again, I think that good writing can help bad acting, but not the other way around.

A lot of people seem to be making the claim that writer’s don’t deserve to be paid any higher than they already are, and that “who are they to demand higher wages when their peers in different crafts remain comparatively underpaid?”. I think this kind of misses the point. Ideally key grips, makeup artists, etc. should, themselves, be organizing into negotiations/possible strikes to gain proper compensation in kind. While I agree that the payment is lopsided, my conclusion is the inverse. It’s not that I think the writer’s are overpaid, it’s that the rest are underpaid. Studios make more than enough money to pay people what they deserve. The people that actually create movies should be the ones that get the profit, not some suit, and this holds true for everything else as well.

The funny thing in all of this is that ultimately, it makes no difference to the networks if I watch any TV at all. I have no Nielsen input whatsoever. Ironically, watching video online is a truer measure of viewership than the outdated Nielsen system.

In my ideal world, ten years from now there won’t be any such thing as an ill informed old man executive dictacting what happens to the talent, acting only a sponge to soak up the revenue…is there really any need for these guys??? The writers may not have gotten a settlement yet but they have sure got the upper hand as far as the public is concerned.

When you call out against “millionaire writers getting paid twice!” you’re just kinda showing your don’t understand the system by which artists are paid in America – which is OK. It IS a little weird.

But the fact of the matter is that they are the CREATORS of this material – not employees. They surrender the copyright to their original work to the studio in exchange for these residuals.

And while the studios do carry the finacial risk for producing it, they make hefty profits in the hudreds of millions of dollars while the writers are paid very modestly. Most of these writers are NOT wealthy.

The writers are just asking for a slightly larger percentage – not larger amounts of upfront cash. They just want to be paid more if the project sells more. That’s it. Right now, they earn less than one third of one percent on every DVD and digital downlaod and nothing on streaming video. They are asking for a higher percentage – still under one percent. (Studio profit margins are somewhere in the 40% range.)

That’s not exactly greedy, is it?

UGH!!!

The trouble is, these dudes seem to be more than happy to collect the revenue from something they don’t seem to understand, but they are just appalled when they are addressed on the issue and asked to share this new media revenue with its CREATORS.

I have no problem with collective bargaining for greater remuneration but this royalty ‘entitlement’ mentality is indefensible. The writers are no more entitled to royalties — from the Internet or otherwise — than the grips, sound technicians, or other ‘creators’ of the show, or than the rest of the employed world is when creating products: A software programmer wouldn’t be entitled to royalties from every copy of a piece of software he wrote while working for a company.

They are perfectly entitled to try and negotiate for royalties but they are not wronged if they don’t get them.

The ‘arguments’ in that video were logically baseless.

“This is ridiculous. Even if I could take off, I’d never get past the tractor beam.”

What we need is something to get that tractor beam out of commission.

http://www.humblenarrator.com/2007/11/15/wwe-aficionados-decry-lack-of-spontaneity-during-writers-strike/

Fair enough. I bought into BoinkBoink’s false dichotomy. I’ve been an employee where I get to be creative and that’s what I’m hired for, and I’ve been an employee where all I’m supposed to do is parrot information. In my haste I ignored the job I like better…

These aren’t royalties, these are residuals. Residuals represent deferred payment for the work they created.

As much as I despise unions, especially when it comes to skilled workers, it is fun watching hollyweird take it in the pants…