raving lunacy - oxymorons for the 21st century

Writing anything is a perilous adventure. From spelling, punctuation, style, form, substance, and in last place logic, from fiction to government reports, writing continues.

Writing anything is a perilous adventure. The act of creation, published or not, automagically creates copyright, which allows you a certain control over the manner of duplication, publication, and monetization. In the US, writing has been protected by copyright since copyright laws were born. So there are basically 2 ways of swapping money for stuff in the writing game, licensing your copyrighted work, or work for hire.

We have ‘work for hire’, which is pretty much what it says, you work for somebody, they give you money, they own what you did. This is the most pure form of swapping money for stuff. Very few writers take this road, for a multitude of reasons, from ignorance to ego.

Retaining Copyright and Licensing is another animal entirely. This means that in order for your work to make you money, you will need to make a deal, licensing or assigning some or all of the copyrights to a publisher. Publishers are not limited to folks who put out books and magazines, but also includes music companies and production companies like movie studios and TV networks.

In most cases these deals are structured to pay you a royalty for every copy sold, minus production and promotion costs, which have traditionally been under the control of the publishers accountants, whose creativity in reassigning costs and delaying payments makes most authors cry and most musicians die broke.

The current Hollywood writers strike, containing that group of writers who write the words and jokes that come out of the mouths of late night talk show guys, and episodic shows, is revolving around residuals, which are royalty payments in the video world. Residuals broadly defined are payments for rebroadcast of a show. They got paid for doing the work once, and by contract are eligible for a second bite of the apple if the show gets rebroadcast. Nice work if you can get it.

With the internet and DVD players in almost every house with television, the studios are packaging shows and offering them for sale, online and in the stores. For the studios this is a cash cow of immense importance, as a show or movie can generate as much if not more in DVD sales, which up till now has been pure profit for the studios.

The crux of the biscuit is the writers are considering these sales as rebroadcasts, and therefore subject to residuals. Real Nice work if they can get it. A third bite of the apple so to speak. I am all for folks making a living, but this residual business makes me a little bit uncomfortable.

For example, I am putting in a new bathroom for a client, who is paying me for my knowledge, expertise and labor. Normally at the end of the job, the client will give me a final payment and I will move on to the next project.

But hey, this residual thing has possibilities! Since I provided the knowledge, expertise, and labor, to allow them to have new indoor plumbing, I should receive a payment every time they take a shower, take a crap or flush the toilet. After all, this is a creation of my blood sweat and tears, and so like the writers, I should be compensated for every use. I should probably require them to tastefully display my name across from the toilet as a reminder that without me they would not be crapping indoors.

The centerpiece of writers case is the studios suing Internet sites like the Viacom You Tube Billion dollar copyright infringement lawsuit. The writers smell money and want to get a piece of the action. They are acting more like enforcers for a mob, than folks whose talent has been compensated at least once.

At some point, enough is enough.
Have they been given a raw deal by the studios? Probably, as most publishers of every stripe use creative accounting, fear, uncertainty, and doubt, to drive down the cost of production. Are writers being fairly compensated? Probably not as well as they would like, considering that they are on strike. However, it shakes out, at the end of the day, the writers will have to become accountants, to see that they get this latest entitlement, and the cost of everything having to do with television and movies right down to the DVD I buy and watch is going up.

The quality of everything will suffer as well, as the writers will be spending more time calculating sales, waiting by the mailbox for the residual checks to make them mailbox millionaires, leaving less time for things like writing.