“As picketing continues outside studio gates, everyone from talent agents to George Clooney has been mentioned or tried their hand at mediating between the Writers Guild of America (WGA) and executives of the TV networks and film production companies. But here’s a name that hasn’t crossed too many minds: Steve Jobs, Apple’s bearded, music-loving chief executive officer,” Ron Grover reports for BusinessWeek.
“Consider this scenario: On Jan. 15, as the writers’ walkout drags into its eighth week, Jobs will take the stage for a keynote at his annual Macworld conference. He’s expected to announce that at least two—and possibly as many as five—studios have signed up to offer their movies for download to Apple’s video iPod and Apple TV products. That will no doubt generate big headlines—everything Jobs announces at Macworld does—and could make the notion of downloading movies from the Web a hot topic after years of false starts,” Grover reports.
“In doing so, Jobs could also put a Hollywood-style klieg light on the major issue separating the writers and movie moguls: how to cut in the unions for a share of the revenue from a new market that the studios have insisted isn’t yet big enough to share,” Grover reports. “‘It could validate everything that we’ve been saying,’ says WGA Assistant Executive Director Charles Slocum. ‘If he also announces that it will be in high-definition and you can order from the TV, it will mean the creation of a whole new market.'”
“During the short-lived negotiations this December before the writers hit the picket lines, the studios offered the same 1.2% for TV shows that are streamed on the Net, though not until after they have already been online for six weeks at a fixed rate of $250,” Grover reports. “The big thing that has kept the two sides from coming together is that studio executives insist there’s no market as yet for new media and they don’t want to get caught up in making expansive deals with the unions until there is one. Indeed, in their first go-round, the studios suggested they conduct a three-year study to determine the size of the market.”
Full article here.
The studios’ are full of it. Who cares what the size of the market is today? The percentage is all that matters. If you make a buck or a billion bucks, how much is the writers’ work worth? Figure out the percentage. The bigger the market grows, they more you all make. This has nothing to do with how big the market is, what size it will be sometime in the future, three-year ruses, and blah, blah, blah. It’s all about the percentage.
Now wait a minute…he still has to walk on Water, cure cancer, and win the olympic decathalon.
Just my $0.02
First of all, why should writers or actors or anyone else EXCEPT the person, persons, or entity that owns a copyright work continued to be paid for its use?
Writers are no different than anyone else. If I own a studio, and I pay you to do a job, i.e. write a script, you’ve been paid. Thank you. Get out.
You don’t see anyone else whining when their work gets used again. I wrote software over a decade ago in banks that is still in us today, and has been repurposed many times. It’s what they paid me to do. Just because they turned around and used it for something else doesn’t mean I should get a royalty check.
I don’t personally care if they eve come off strike. This is great!
Hire some freaking new writers. Give new creative minds a chance. This striking crop of jokes is as bad as a Letterman or Leno routine. No one really wants to see it, we’d just like to see the guests make fools of themselves.
Lumping Steve Jobs into this circus is just silly.
More soulless demons taking advantage of people who actually create something in this world. MDN is right, its the percentage. This is about nothing more than greed.
Silly me, I thought it was “all about the Benjamins.”
tm sruge
“Just because they turned around and used it for something else doesn’t mean I should get a royalty check.”
Actually, perhaps you should.
10% of nothing is still nothing.
Can Steve Jobs make bread rise faster?
What can’t he do?
Geez, TheloniousMac’s arrogant rant besmirches both the names he has stolen, Monk’s and Apple’s. Mr. Mac needs a new logic board.
And MDN, howzabout knocking off those wretched pop-up ads which sneak by Safari’s blocker? This site is the only one in the Mac community that gives me those damned things. This site has become a virus.
“Captain! I can’t maintain the Reality Distortion Field much longa! She’s gonna blow!”
That article is pushing limits of even my RDF!
The market has a way of correcting itself. If the writers feel like they are not getting the proper compensation for their labor, they should find a different way to sell their work. Perhaps they should produce “TV” shows without a studio and sell them directly to the consumer via iTunes. If it catches on, the studios will capitulate.
theloniousMac, Writers are no different than anyone else. If I own a studio, and I pay you to do a job, i.e. write a script, you’ve been paid. Thank you. Get out. Amen, brother thelonious.
Unions are the great leveler. Everyone sinks to the bottom level.
In the 1800’s unions were needed, now there are labor laws.
The biggest unions are in government. Jobs for life, no matter how little you produce – Oh! that’s right, government produces nothing – except taxes. The best companies have no unions, or onions for that matter!
What’s not mentioned in the MDN info (and even the Busness Week article) is that you could argue that Jobs is techincally under action by the WGA, being as he is Disney’s largest shareholder. Chew on that.
This is Hollywood’s opportunity to try to get me back into watching TV.
Hire all new writers and start over. The dialog I see on most TV shows is sooooo bad, it’s an insult to my intelligence to think I would be entertained by it.
TV commercials are even worse. Like, I’m going to buy insurance from a company that thinks a talking gecko will appeal to me. It may be cute & all, but they’re trying to sell insurance for crying out loud.
@Centris 650-
Does that thing still work? Cool…
Writers in entertainment = Developers in software.
They deserve a fair cut. It’s that simple.
Folks let’s keep something very clear and in the front of this disscussion. The way a writer makes a living as a career is that they get paid up front for thier work and inbetween jobs the residuals keep them afloat until the next job. If you take away the residual then you are putting the industry that “CREATES YOUR CONTENT” to death.
When debating this topic please do not forget this very important point.
end of line
@ Ron
“…Oh! that’s right, government produces nothing – except taxes!…”
The vote for someone who is against taxes, completely… Ron Paul wants to do away with the IRS and replace it with… nothing! No taxes… your paycheck is 1,000.00…… you take 1,000.00 home! What a conecpt huh.
The Dude abides.
http://www.ronpaul2008.com/
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=ron+paul&search=Search
@theloniusMac
Writers get peanuts and the real compensation comes per ticket/DVD/BD sold.
Just like composers get paid a certain % when buy a CD. If you accept a deal, where the studio keeps reaping the profits after the movie is finished, you’re a moron.
“…Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men’s stupidity, but your talent to their reason…”
Ayn Rand
It’s absurd to believe that you should continue to be paid by a company for work you did while under the employ of that company. I don’t care if you’re a writer, an actor, a producer, a director, or a janitor. You were hired to do a job. You did it. End of story. Just because you consider your work ooohhhh “creative” doesn’t mean that it isn’t work that was paid for, in full, at the time.
To believe that you should continue to be paid, that is the height of arrogance.
If you want to OWN your work, don’t work for someone else.
Do these simpletons even understand the concept that THEY ARE WORKING FOR SOMEONE ELSE?
I say leave them on the picket lines. Let them work on writing better signs until they come back crawling for less money.
GOOD WRITERS don’t have to strike for royalties. They are just given them. Their talent is the only negotiator they need.
@theloniousMac
*Yawn* Where did you come from? If I develop and patent a new method (software or otherwise) if someone else wants to use it, they can negotiate a royalty. The way the writers/studios relationship is structured, the writers PAYMENT is based on a fixed cost PLUS A COMMISSION. So your argument is a bit like vaporware. Look at most sales jobs, for example. They are structured with a base payment plus a commission. To take it a step further, the studios were saying that the Internet doesn’t really qualify because there are no revenues yet. There should be an easy solution to this and it just requires level heads, not greedy ones.
TheloniousMac
Well, you see the irony in the argument.
1. If I buy a DVD, I an use it in any way I want. I can rip, make multiple copies for watching it on TV, computer, and iPod. But, the movie moguls want me to pay for every single use. By your logic, I paid the money for the content. They shouldn’t worry about how I use it.
2. The problem is that the same people who want money per use, don’t want to share the money per use with people who helped create the content. They want to pay them once, and use them however they want.
I don’t care which side you support, at least support consistently for all.
@Danno Boano
Your analogy of writing to sales is at best illogical. A sales person is paid a base salary and in some cases an incentive of a percentage of sales. Just like anyone else they work for the base salary. If the company they’re working for WISHES to pay the additional incentive, that is up to the company.
In fact, this “royalty” system is like nothing anywhere else in the world. It also does not equate the the patent system mentioned above. If you design something, no one PAID you do to it. You did it on your own, and you then took out the patent. You own it. Of course you can license people to use it.
If you hire a bunch of engineers and they design it, while under your employ, do you think you should continue to pay the engineers royalties from licensing fees? I doubt it, and it doesn’t happen.
Do you think the woman who accidentally invented the adhesive on yellow stickies is continuing to be paid by 3M? Do you think that Stepahnie Kwolek continues to receive royalties from DuPont for accidentally inventing Kevlar while under their employ? Heck no!
While working for HP, Digital Equipment Corporation, and even Apple I sign agreements that anything I “create” belongs to them. That’s the real world.
This “you should pay me forever” fantasy world that artists live in is just another form of socialism.
theloniusMac,
I guess you WISH we were back in the Stone Ages! Where it was kill or be killed. Where working conditions were horrible and amounted to slavery.
It’s 2008! The real successful organizations (example: Google) believe in treating their employees well. In turn, these incentives mean your employees work harder knowing they have a stake in the company.
theloniusMac, do you like being treated like a piece of garbage? Do you enjoy being abused? DO YOU like to working in horrible-unsafe-toxic-cancerous-life-threatening conditions?
You must be incredibly miserable.
… or sadistically happy.
@ theloniousMac – So that means the retired (unnamed) Boeing executive should not get an amount equal to $50,000 for each airplane Boeing expects to sell for the rest of his life as part of his retirement package? It would make for less expensive airplanes if he didn’t and I don’t see that his continued breathing adds any economic value to Boeings product. But, wait, those payment were part of his contract.
Your attitude reminds me of the poem:
You’re paid to stop a bullet,
It’s a soldiers job, they say.
So, then you stop the bullet,
And then they stop your pay
I think your problem is you just didn’t negotiate a smart enough contract. Or are you drawing retirement benefits from the company that employed you so long ago? Isn’t that continued payment for past work. What would Ayn think of that.
theloniusMac is obviously a discophile of Friedman’s “Free-market economics” in thinking the system will balance itself out, which has proven false from Pinochet, to New Orleans.
As far Jobs’ intervention in this, I don’t think he will intervene at all, let alone behalf of the writers. I know he has criticized the teachers unions within the US saying that they are organized in the worst-way possible, although he didn’t elaborate if this meant they were poorly organized, or just anti-union rhetoric.
Jobs aside there was an interview with a WGA member on democracy now last Friday. http://www.democracynow.org/2008/1/11/writers_strike_continues_in_3rd_month
I’m not trying to plug but this explains pretty clealry as to what is going on.