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People who write books aren't paid to write. They are paid based on the sales their book generates. They can write for years and make nothing, they can even get published and make almost nothing. Royalties are a device for the benefit of publishers, not authors, because they allow authors to get paid entirely on the success of their product. Indeed, when authors get paid before delivering a manuscript, it's called an "advance" - because it then comes out of royalties.

TV writers, on the other hand, get paid for writing, and their pay is not conditional on the show making a profit. That risk is absorbed by the networks, producers, etc.

This seems to me to be a basic difference between the two situations. Others include the author being solely responsible for the work and the writer being only one part of a much larger organisation; the risk taken on by an author in undertaking a project for which he may never earn a penny; and of course the reality that most authors - save for the most successful few % - have other jobs because royalties are insufficient to support them.

Mr Bean wrote:Or.... could it be that the companies that writers depend on are highly changeable and there are tons of programs that don't require writers and sometimes the whole line-up goes from requiring two hundred writers for five shows to twenty writers for six reality shows.

Work conditions are highly variable for fishermen too, but you don't see people on message boards rushing to explain that this means somebody should guarantee them royalties every time you eat fish. There are plenty of occupations out there which have no guarantees, which offer only seasonal income, which are even physically dangerous. Why is it that this is only scandalous in entertainment-related jobs?

Since the production studios already lost many scripted TV shows to grossly overblown music royalties, wouldn't script royalties be another unnecessary layer of corporate welfare grinding things to a halt?

Big Orange wrote:Since the production studios already lost many scripted TV shows to grossly overblown music royalties, wouldn't script royalties be another unnecessary layer of corporate welfare grinding things to a halt?

Script writers don't have that kind of control(For the most part) if you take a show of theirs and syndicate it or make a DVD box set they simply get a cut. They can't demand a higher cut, when they produce the work they get the rights to a cut of it when it produces revenue.

Androsphinx wrote:People who write books aren't paid to write. They are paid based on the sales their book generates. They can write for years and make nothing, they can even get published and make almost nothing. Royalties are a device for the benefit of publishers, not authors, because they allow authors to get paid entirely on the success of their product. Indeed, when authors get paid before delivering a manuscript, it's called an "advance" - because it then comes out of royalties.

TV writers, on the other hand, get paid for writing, and their pay is not conditional on the show making a profit. That risk is absorbed by the networks, producers, etc.

Not quite, if the show is a failure then they don't get re-hired
If a writer works on a show that fails utterly, he loses his job. He might have gotten that one paycheck for 35k out of the show but he's not going to be working for them again and with a good old fashion "resume stain" of writing for a terrible show he will likely not get writer work again. He faces risk, if the show he writes for is not successful he does not get to keep working.

Further his risk is never being able to work in the industry again. Yes the industry soaked up the losses for a terrible show and the writer suffered no losses but he's not exactly rolling in gains either.

Androsphinx wrote:This seems to me to be a basic difference between the two situations. Others include the author being solely responsible for the work and the writer being only one part of a much larger organisation; the risk taken on by an author in undertaking a project for which he may never earn a penny; and of course the reality that most authors - save for the most successful few % - have other jobs because royalties are insufficient to support them.

This is true of entertainment writers as well. Unless your good(Oh and your crew has to be good too) your not going to get rich, you might make a living at it, but you will not be "successful" at the job. Your going to work for a year but you have no career path. No way to move to any other part of the business.

I should repeat this point, being a writer, even a some-what successful writer is a shitty gig. You might do some good work but due to network dynamics never be called back and instead to start looking at that Walmart Greeter gig.

Darth Wong wrote:Work conditions are highly variable for fishermen too, but you don't see people on message boards rushing to explain that this means somebody should guarantee them royalties every time you eat fish. There are plenty of occupations out there which have no guarantees, which offer only seasonal income, which are even physically dangerous. Why is it that this is only scandalous in entertainment-related jobs?

Funny you should mention this because I was seriously considering a stint in the Merchant Marine and other maritime related jobs and for fun I did look into what fisherman pays. If you mean fisherman not in the sense of some guy on the dock with fishing gearing selling his catch to the upscale restaurants but instead the boat workers out on the fish craft well you'll be happy to learn that they too get shitty pay(25k-37k for the old salts) range but they get bonuses for going out on multiple trips, and they are offered profit sharing under certain contracts where they can get a tiny percentage of the profit the boat made when it sold it's catch which they after all pulled in.

A good two week trip could earn you up to five thousand dollars if your lucky, and six thousand if your very lucky.

And Wong your comparing something which degrades to something which can be copied infinitely. A fisherman can not claim royalties because fish are perishable and limited use resources. I catch a fish, I sell you fish, you eat fish, end of transaction.

I write a TV show, you watch TV show (And pay me via watching Commercials), a year later my show goes into syndication and you see same episode(More commercials income) then maybe you like show enough to by my DVD box set(Which I get a royalties cut for it) or my ultra blue-ray special edition directors cut version.

At no point do I have to write a new show, it's the same show over and over again(Maybe in HD this time)
However there IS only one fish.

Bean, I've seen the writers' royalties compared to an amusement park as well. By your logic the engineer who designed Batman: The Ride should be getting a royalty every time I get on it and nearly throw up. How much do you want to be he doesn't?

FireNexus wrote:Bean, I've seen the writers' royalties compared to an amusement park as well. By your logic the engineer who designed Batman: The Ride should be getting a royalty every time I get on it and nearly throw up. How much do you want to be he doesn't?

Depends does the park charge money at each ride or a park entrance fee?
Also was the engineer contracted to build the ride? Or just design it? Was the engineer already working under contract(Like Disney's famous fungineers) to produce rides in general or was this a one of contract?

The same arguments can be made for writers FYI, not all of them get the royalty. Not all of them get the royalty for every episode because few shows have just one guy/gal who writes all twenty one episodes. I warn you we are starting to stray into areas I lack information for but based on my second hand-knowledge from this area. A writer may or may not be entitled to full royalties every time the episode is shown somewhere, he might be entitled to a cut as part of the team over-all but a very very small cut. On the order of less than a fifty dollars per year.

I suppose if engineers and writers ran off the same contract the engineer could claim to get a cut, however that cut would not exactly be a large one if the park was a entrance fee only one(Which 90% of them are) as the only cut the Corperation would give him would be the %traffic of people who went to the park JUST to see Batman: The Ride.

Either way it's a false dichotomy
Just because writers currently operate under their current system is no reason engineers should not operate under the same system or vise-versa or some third system of reward. It's not just A or B here.

Certainly it's not a total dichotomy, but the argument that is made against the writers is that other professions do not receive comparable compensation for work of similar importance to the resulting product. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that no amusement park engineer currently employed receives that kind of compensation in addition to the going rate. Building architects don't get a cut of the rent in addition to the going rate to design a building. And this is bearing in mind that those are far more difficult fields to enter and maintain skills in than writing. Let's face it, SDN is full of professional-quality writers who do other things for a living. It's owned by one. Good writers are a dime a dozen, good engineers and architects are a fair bit more valuable.

The pay that entertainment professionals receive is unheard of by the standards of every other industry. I can think of no reason why other industries shouldn't be paid the same way, but the fact that they aren't is important. This would lead me as (I hope) a reasonable person to conclude that their pay scale is unreasonable.

Not quite, if the show is a failure then they don't get re-hired
If a writer works on a show that fails utterly, he loses his job. He might have gotten that one paycheck for 35k out of the show but he's not going to be working for them again and with a good old fashion "resume stain" of writing for a terrible show he will likely not get writer work again. He faces risk, if the show he writes for is not successful he does not get to keep working.

You mean, like any other job ever?

This is true of entertainment writers as well. Unless your good(Oh and your crew has to be good too) your not going to get rich, you might make a living at it, but you will not be "successful" at the job. Your going to work for a year but you have no career path. No way to move to any other part of the business.

I should repeat this point, being a writer, even a some-what successful writer is a shitty gig. You might do some good work but due to network dynamics never be called back and instead to start looking at that Walmart Greeter gig.

As I said several times above "I have a shitty job because there are too many people try to be writers and the work is seasonal" is not a good reason to give writers residuals. It might engender sympathy towards their goals (except less so from me because the low pay and high unemployment are things they signed up for), but its not the sort of qualitatitive leap which would justify a fee for use in perpetuity.

Rather, it seems increasingly clear that these two features of the writing industry - high unemployment and residuals - are directly connected. Because writers can't fight individually for much higher wages (due to the huge numbers of unemployed writers), they have to work en masse through the device of residuals, where they can work as a group. That may be sensible as a tactical move, but it's not some sort of inherent right.

Part 1

Androsphinx wrote: You mean, like any other job ever?

Err no
Sorry to say but as an doctor if I accidentally kill someone less people will know about it then if I co-wrote "Joey"
There's also sorts of jobs where you can screw the fucking pooch and it not be obvious and you can go on to do great things.
Like be President of the United States of America for example, or how about Wall-Street Banker? Trust me, more people know about shitty TV sitcoms then they know about the guy who lead AIG into the double digit billion loss area.

Mr Bean wrote:Part 1

Androsphinx wrote: You mean, like any other job ever?

Err no
Sorry to say but as an doctor if I accidentally kill someone less people will know about it then if I co-wrote "Joey"
There's also sorts of jobs where you can screw the fucking pooch and it not be obvious and you can go on to do great things.
Like be President of the United States of America for example, or how about Wall-Street Banker? Trust me, more people know about shitty TV sitcoms then they know about the guy who lead AIG into the double digit billion loss area.

Are you seriously trying to say that TV writers are the only people whose future employment is predicated on past performance?

Bean, two different arguments there:

The writers may have gone on strike over breach of contract signed with the union. No problem with that.

But the idea that someone is entitled to being paid forever (royalties) for work done once is what's under attack here and that's a far harder model to defend. Currently it's only in the entertainment industry (including also publishing in addition to the movie and music industries) that this is done and the problems with it become obvious the second you apply the same logic to other industries. You can't just handwave them away.

Mr Bean wrote:Just because writers currently operate under their current system is no reason engineers should not operate under the same system or vise-versa or some third system of reward. It's not just A or B here.

The point here is that you are claiming the royalty system is the only reasonable system, and it's not. Just as in my fishermen example, you can point out the distinctions between writers and fishermen but you're sidestepping the point, which is that nobody particularly gives a shit about how well-compensated these people are unless they're in the entertainment industry. You know as well as I do that nobody outside the fishing industry gives a damn how well fishermen are paid. The only difference with entertainment people is that they're excellent whiners, and they're good at tricking people like you into thinking that their compensation is a matter of social justice.

Darth Wong wrote:

Mr Bean wrote:Or.... could it be that the companies that writers depend on are highly changeable and there are tons of programs that don't require writers and sometimes the whole line-up goes from requiring two hundred writers for five shows to twenty writers for six reality shows.

Work conditions are highly variable for fishermen too, but you don't see people on message boards rushing to explain that this means somebody should guarantee them royalties every time you eat fish. There are plenty of occupations out there which have no guarantees, which offer only seasonal income, which are even physically dangerous. Why is it that this is only scandalous in entertainment-related jobs?

Sometimes I get the sense that your basic position is, if some people get a shitty deal, then everybody should get a shitty deal. We shouldn't look to improve everybody's position; we should look to bring everybody down to the base level.

Of course I'm pretty sure that isn't really your position, but it sure seems like it sometimes based upon your arguments, which usually seem to distill to the most minimal thing one group gets, should be the most that any group should expect - what business do they have, trying for more?

Kanastrous wrote:Of course I'm pretty sure that isn't really your position, but it sure seems like it sometimes based upon your arguments, which usually seem to distill to the most minimal thing one group gets, should be the most that any group should expect - what business do they have, trying for more?

It's not that they have no right to try for more. It's that they shouldn't expect the rest of us to feel sorry for them. Although in some cases (particularly public service unions), they are often so lavishly overpaid that they really don't have the right to try for more, because we're all forced to pay for them with taxpayer dollars. At least TV networks' products are a luxury rather than a necessity.

Okay. For what it's worth, don't worry: as a unionist I don't particularly give a damn what non-unionists think, past whatever valid points they make, and having to account for their influence on legislators. I'm certainly uninterested in whether or not people feel sorry for us, or really how they feel about us, at all.

Who would've thought writers would have a gift for rhetoric?

Maybe if fishermen got agents that sold their fish for them under commission agreements, they'd get better deals too? It would suck if someone bought a load of fish from you and then sliced out the payments for every fourth fish. The lawyers in production companies are duplicitous swine, and they leave out stuff that you'll have a hand in creating (or catching in the fisherman analogy) so they don't have to pay you for it.

Oh, and to some extent, people do give a shit about unfair business practises that are aimed around screwing the guys at the end. That's why fair trade items exist.

^ that's a joke that has been making the rounds, for months, now: the writers got what they wanted because they knew how to make the case; they're writers. The actors, on the other hand...need writers to put the pitch together, for them.

Kanastrous wrote:Okay. For what it's worth, don't worry: as a unionist I don't particularly give a damn what non-unionists think, past whatever valid points they make, and having to account for their influence on legislators. I'm certainly uninterested in whether or not people feel sorry for us, or really how they feel about us, at all.

Then why does it bother you that I don't think writers deserve lifetime royalties on their work? Shouldn't you say "Good for you, you have your own opinion and I have mine?"

It's no different from picking an argument with someone over anything you happen to disagree with them on. The fact that I disagree with you doesn't alter the fact that I acknowledge your entitlement to your opinion, as I'm entitled to mine. Particularly since you don't happen to be in a position to influence future policy, anyway.

And there's also the fact that I have yet to construct a successful counter-argument that stands apart from my personal convictions on the matter.

BTW, has anyone arguing that the writers strike was unfair actually pulled up any numbers showing that paying the residuals would heavily decrease the profits of the networks?

Thanas wrote:BTW, has anyone arguing that the writers strike was unfair actually pulled up any numbers showing that paying the residuals would heavily decrease the profits of the networks?

Is this a serious question? By definition, $1 paid in residuals = $1 reduction in profit. Residuals must decrease the profits of the networks; it's completely absurd to ask for a source to verify such a basic concept.

Companies try to hold down expenses in order to increase profit. Residuals are an expense. I don't see what the issue is here. Are you arguing that it's a tiny expense, and therefore insignificant? It seems unlikely that the networks would have risked so much financial loss in a labour dispute over a tiny and insignificant expense.

I think the key word in Thanas' post is heavily. Is the demand upon the Producers' Guild/Studios unduly burdensome? Their definition of 'unduly burdensome' is basically every single penny they'd prefer to keep.

Darth Wong wrote:

Thanas wrote:BTW, has anyone arguing that the writers strike was unfair actually pulled up any numbers showing that paying the residuals would heavily decrease the profits of the networks?

Is this a serious question? By definition, $1 paid in residuals = $1 reduction in profit. Residuals must decrease the profits of the networks; it's completely absurd to ask for a source to verify such a basic concept.

I think you missed a word there.

Companies try to hold down expenses in order to increase profit. Residuals are an expense. I don't see what the issue is here. Are you arguing that it's a tiny expense, and therefore insignificant?

Did you watch the video MrBean linked to? Because it sure seems a tiny expense.

It seems unlikely that the networks would have risked so much financial loss in a labour dispute over a tiny and insignificant expense.

Need I remind you of the RIAA? So far media companies have always reacted out of proportion to every little threat/expense that could ever possibly exist.

Darth Wong wrote:
Companies try to hold down expenses in order to increase profit. Residuals are an expense. I don't see what the issue is here. Are you arguing that it's a tiny expense, and therefore insignificant? It seems unlikely that the networks would have risked so much financial loss in a labour dispute over a tiny and insignificant expense.

Are you seriously arguing that a major corporation would not engage in moronic practices for short-sighted reasons?

OAN
Per a quick Google search FYI the Writers Strike four month strike cost the studio's roughly 3.5 billion in exchange for a roughly 410-690 million dollar a year decrease in profits from the across the board upgrade in residuals if you want to talk economic impact. DVD's are still are an exllent profit source for them with most DVD sales minus store cut, production, packaging and transport averages between five dollars even to as much as nine dollars thirty cents for a new release with premium sets and DVD box sets pulling in even more lopsided profit figures. Last check the claimed 2007 DVD sales alone were worth 17 billion dollars as an industry over-all.

Bear in mind that the studios - like any large business, I suppose - are heavily invested in union-busting at every possible opportunity. So every loss for the unions and guilds looks like a win to them, and every win for the unions and guilds makes the majors feel as though they're being set up for the loss of more ground, in the future.

For the last several contract negotiations the IATSE has basically settled for maintenance of the status quo, and counted itself lucky to achieve that.