Wednesday, December 05, 2007

Writers strike

Writers are amazingly easy to find right now, most of them are picketting outside film studios. The Writers Strike in America has many happy angles that i am looking forward to exploring.

One of the main issues for this strike is that writers are not getting paid for their content that gets sold online. So if a TV writer had his episode of television sold to iTunes, he would get nothing from that sale. Currently writers are only being paid for the work they do that gets aired on television and .3% of the first million for the sales of DVD and VHS. This means that there are a lot of hungry writers out there!

I am against having to pay for most of my media. Basically i believe that if it can be aired on TV and i don't have to pay, than i should be allowed to download it to my computer for free too. However, just because i don't pay, doesn't mean that the networks don't get paid for my download. Veoh.com legally airs tv programs from networks. They take a commercial break every so often. PLUS they also have advertisements that decorate each page. Networks are getting paid a lot of money for these advertisment spots!

Is it fair that writers don't get a cut? I believe the only answer is a loud and resounding NO! Writers put in a lot more work than even the actors (and i've done both these jobs. i do actually know this one) While writing at times is easy, most of the time its really hard. Yet, writers are still given scraps from the network table. Do i believe that they should be getting 2.5% of the gross profit?...well, the amount is negotiable but they should definately be getting more than nothing!

2 comments:

Peter Ansell said...

why don't the writers form a company and contract their services out on a licensing basis, instead of simply giving away their intellectual property to the media company as employees?

Then they get protected by all those american laws which protect companies more than individuals... just a thought!

kris said...

very true. in the last 8ish years corporate america has become quite a force. They have lots of laws to protect them but few laws to protect the "working person".