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So a half-billion dollar a year change in profitability is insignificant now, especially when it involves contractual obligations that will last for many many years into the future? AND their entire business model is shrinking due to factors outside their control which show no sign of mitigating in the future?

In a hundreds-of-billions-of-dollars-yearly industry...yes, fairly insignificant. If you're a millionaire, is your entire model upset by a yearly revenue decline of a few dollars?

And, the business model is likewise expanding into the 'new media' realm - in which the studios hope to shut out the unions and guilds entirely, if they are allowed to.

Darth Wong wrote:So a half-billion dollar a year change in profitability is insignificant now, especially when it involves contractual obligations that will last for many many years into the future? AND their entire business model is shrinking due to factors outside their control which show no sign of mitigating in the future?

Wha? The media's markets and business is expanding and has been expanding for some time. Newspapers are down but people watch even more TV now than they did a few years ago. Movies and content is making more money than ever. Yes ad-revenue but your forgetting how giant the average media companies are today because when business is lost in one area, it's gained in another. The only area where it's out and out falling is print, magazines, newspapers, those are tanking. However TV shows are doing better(Ad sales are down but it's offset by DVD sales and cheaper production costs)


I'm puzzled by the position your taking Mike as it is in essence "Screw the writers, profit is all!" Nevermind the profits said writers have helped generate, we are talking about a system where in the corporation understands that by shooting itself in the foot and pissing off the base of it's production system, it has no positive benefit and only negative ones? By paying writers poorly it increases the chances of other companies being able to easily steal writers away, by breaking a promise it made it raises discontent and does bad things to the stock price(As happens during a labor strike of any kind), and worst of all it cost them directly in a big and public way when they stood up to writers, lost those billions during the strike and then agreed to honor their word they broke in the first place.

What your arguing for here is that the companies should not have given in to the writers, and damn them to hell profits are everything! Our word? Worthless! We will lie to you every day of the week!

Franky your position is almost lolbertarian in nature. Pissing off the means of production so you might get a little bit more profit. Where the demands of the writers excessive or extreme you might have a case, but their demands were not, so what is your position, if you were Viacom's CEO and the writers came to you and asked you to honor your agreement you made in the 80's what would you would have done?

(FYI the real life answer was to tell the writers to piss off and give yourself a raise in Viacom's case, good stuff)

I doubt that writer's royalties would matter much if many of theirs shows cannot get syndicated or published properly, due to oppressive music royalties.

I'm puzzled why the music industry's demands with music clearance have been allowed to spin almost completely out of control. Their sheer avarice and outright stupid is preventing them from enabling the promotion of their music, to start with. It is culturally unhealthy and makes little business sense: If you have too many toll booths on the road, fewer things go down the road, and the illicit smuggling tunnels get used instead, so anybody who can gain something out of it loses out (including the toll collectors).

And is it also true that many broadcast shows get edited down to fit in more fucking ad breaks?!

Big Orange wrote: And is it also true that many broadcast shows get edited down to fit in more fucking ad breaks?!

Yes. Sometimes the content is actually sped-up slightly, to open up more time for ads, too.

Mr Bean wrote:

Darth Wong wrote:So a half-billion dollar a year change in profitability is insignificant now, especially when it involves contractual obligations that will last for many many years into the future? AND their entire business model is shrinking due to factors outside their control which show no sign of mitigating in the future?

Wha? The media's markets and business is expanding and has been expanding for some time.

Did you not read the article? We're talking specifically about the broadcast networks, which are shrinking due to the encroachment of other forms of media. Most of what you see on TV nowadays is not originally produced programming; it is "reality TV", cheesy pseudo-documentaries, tabloid news, and of course, vast amounts of syndicated material being re-run.

I'm puzzled by the position your taking Mike as it is in essence "Screw the writers, profit is all!"

No, my position is "no one deserves lifetime royalties for anything". If scientists and inventors who develop disease cures and useful technologies don't get lifetime royalties, I'd like to know what fucking rationale you have for some guy getting lifetime royalties for writing an episode of "Full House".

Franky your position is almost lolbertarian in nature.

Frankly, you need to learn how to fucking read. I've never said any of this bullshit you're claiming I did. The fact that I oppose lifetime royalties (with extra royalties tacked on top for every new kind of media something is released on) does not mean I am pushing ultra-capitalism. It is quite possible to oppose a particular compensation scheme without opposing all forms of employee compensation or benefits, or being a corporate profit-monger: something that anyone with the slightest knowledge of my political postings knows I'm not. This repetitive attempt to equate one to the other is nothing more than MASSIVE non sequitur, entirely of your own manufacture, and I'm getting tired of it. Take your bullshit black/white fallacies and go peddle them somewhere else.

Lifetime royalties are corporate welfare and while it worked well enough for the music industry before 1975, when the mass media was less broader and multi-levelled, long before VHS, DVD, TiVo, and the Internet, but since then the music royalty system has become like a ball and chain. Why should we tax TV scripts everytime they're used as well? And some musicians have a pretty warped and selfish thought process, when such a wonderful and world defining information tool like the Internet is called a "theft machine" by them.

Big Orange wrote:And some musicians have a pretty warped and selfish thought process, when such a wonderful and world defining information tool like the Internet is called a "theft machine" by them.

If it's warped and selfish to want payment for what you have yourself created - even if it's more payment than Big O thinks proper - how much more warped and selfish to decide that you're entitled to just help yourself to the content, without paying for it at all? I think that's the 'theft machine' angle about which they're bitching.

The you overpriced your product and I therefore refuse to enrich you by paying what I think is an unfair price is a world away from you overpriced your product and I therefore am entitled to just take it and pay nothing. Boycotting a product can be honorable. Stealing it is just stealing.

Kanastrous wrote:If it's warped and selfish to want payment for what you have yourself created ...

That should read:

If it's warped and selfish to want endless lifetime royalties for what you have yourself created, even if it costs the rest of society dearly to implement the draconian regime you need in order to enforce this edict ...

I don't believe that someone pirating some chunk of copyrighted entertainment is particularly striking a blow against warped and selfish royalty schemes. I think they just see the opportunity to get something of value gratis, for which they'd really prefer not to pay, and they take advantage of what is admittedly a very tasty opportunity. How is screwing someone out of royalties due over a ten year period different from screwing someone out of royalties due over the course of a lifetime?

Answer the point, please.

The inflexible music royalty scheme has backfired in the digital age, preemptively fucking the consumers by damaging the legal publishing of television shows with music content, so only leaving online theft and bootleg DVDs as viable alternatives to get certain material. In the 90s the post-Soviet retail businesses also ran into a similar cul-de-sac, with squabbling shop owners locked in fruitless legal (and physical) battles over shop space and consumer products, leading to nothing getting sold and the shelves remaining bare. The impatient customers said "fuck it!" and got contraband off the back of lorries instead.

Darth Wong wrote:Answer the point, please.

I think I did. I don't believe that stealing stuff is a political statement, a blow for justice, or a stab at the heart of unreasonable royalty agreements. It's just stealing stuff. And efforts to shift the blame to the people from whom the theft is made do not persuade me otherwise.

Kanastrous wrote:

Darth Wong wrote:Answer the point, please.

I think I did.

No you fucking well didn't, asshole. My point had nothing to do with illegal copying whatsoever.

I don't believe that stealing stuff is a political statement, a blow for justice, or a stab at the heart of unreasonable royalty agreements. It's just stealing stuff. And efforts to shift the blame to the people from whom the theft is made do not persuade me otherwise.

Answer the goddamned point.

It is unethical to steal something you can already buy, but it is also unethical to not distribute something because of stifling, unnecessary tariffs attached to it by other parties. It is appalling business sense and dangerously blocking up the natural flow of information. The studios are just getting no money out of consumers instead of some, through the inertia and bickering almost entirely caused by the music protection racket. The problem is not impossible and can be solved: the BBC has Ashes to Ashes available over the Internet free of charge and that's got a soundtrack.

While not without their faults, I can see why the cable television channels are slowly killing network television: their shows have got more creative legs and their business model is more robust, with less shows getting uselessly lost down the cracks and less obnoxious advertising diluting the content. I wonder what scripted entertainment be like in twenty to forty years time?

Darth Wong wrote:

Kanastrous wrote:

Darth Wong wrote:Answer the point, please.

I think I did.

No you fucking well didn't, asshole. My point had nothing to do with illegal copying whatsoever.

I don't believe that stealing stuff is a political statement, a blow for justice, or a stab at the heart of unreasonable royalty agreements. It's just stealing stuff. And efforts to shift the blame to the people from whom the theft is made do not persuade me otherwise.

Answer the goddamned point.

If I get your point, it's that the root of the problem is what you perceive to be excessive royalties flowing to content creators ('why should it be lifelong; why not some fixed number of years etc'). And I disagree that that's the root of the problem, because if royalties were reworked to be limited to ten, or twenty, or thirty years' duration people who preferred getting stuff for free by stealing it to paying whatever the going price might be will still steal it because no reduction in royalties will ever make the price of legitimately purchased media competitive with free.

If your point is that the efforts required to enforce copyright regs are out of proportion to the benefits of enforcing them, I suppose that's because it's not your ox getting gored. Fair enough.

You might as well stop with the copyright infringement = stealing strawman, because they are not the same. Similar in some ways, but not the same. And you're still evading the whole point about the compensation model, which has been brought up several times. The entire compensation model of royalties has a pretty flimsy justification in its current incarnation and many of the problems have been pointed out. You just pretend not to see it, Kanastrous, because it cuts the legs right out from under your argument.

Edi wrote:You might as well stop with the copyright infringement = stealing strawman, because they are not the same. Similar in some ways, but not the same.

I find the similarities damned overwhelming. Taking something valuable to which you have no legal or moral right without compensating the recognized rights-holder is quite close enough.

Edi wrote:And you're still evading the whole point about the compensation model, which has been brought up several times. The entire compensation model of royalties has a pretty flimsy justification in its current incarnation and many of the problems have been pointed out. You just pretend not to see it, Kanastrous, because it cuts the legs right out from under your argument.

Producers get to set prices, and consumers get to choose whether or not to pay them. Boycotting a luxury product you find unreasonably priced is a defensible choice. Simply taking it without paying is not. And it remains true that whether or not the present royalty arrangements are fair, it's not the consumer's right to just take product without paying because of perceived unfairness in the system; if royalties were cut in half, or by three-quarters, or were limited in term to ten years or to six months, people who want free product will take the free product because they want free shit, not because they are fighting some noble battle against unfair compensation to creators.

This implied ennoblement of thievery (or piracy, or uncompensated taking-of-product, or whatever one likes to call it) is ridiculous. People stealing televisions during a riot aren't making a political statement; they're stealing. People pirating licensed intellectual or media property aren't making statements either, past I want this so I'm entitled to take it.

Kanastrous wrote:

Darth Wong wrote:No you fucking well didn't, asshole. My point had nothing to do with illegal copying whatsoever.

If I get your point, it's that the root of the problem is what you perceive to be excessive royalties flowing to content creators ('why should it be lifelong; why not some fixed number of years etc'). And I disagree that that's the root of the problem, because if royalties were reworked to be limited to ten, or twenty, or thirty years' duration people who preferred getting stuff for free by stealing it to paying whatever the going price might be will still steal it because no reduction in royalties will ever make the price of legitimately purchased media competitive with free.

What the fuck is your problem, retard? What part of "my point had nothing to do with illegal copying" do you not understand? You still think this is all about illegal copying.

If your point is that the efforts required to enforce copyright regs are out of proportion to the benefits of enforcing them, I suppose that's because it's not your ox getting gored. Fair enough.

You really are fucking dense, aren't you?

I'm saying that no one deserves lifetime royalties for anything. That's my point. I don't give a shit whether it causes piracy. That's not my point here, asstard. I don't give a fuck about illegal copying for the purposes of this discussion; it's totally irrelevant to this entire discussion, which began as a discussion of whether the writers' demands are intrinsically reasonable.

Darth Wong wrote: I'm saying that no one deserves lifetime royalties for anything. That's my point.

Okay. I disagree. There we are. If someone creates a life-saving cancer-obliterating drug, I wouldn't personally object to them receiving an indefinite royalty. If someone invents a revolutionary sex lube, I wouldn't object to such royalties for them, either. And obviously I feel the same regarding media content.

Where such royalties impede distribution of life-saving items there's room for adjustment; I wouldn't place an indefinite right to royalties above human lives. But since that doesn't apply to any product created by writers, I think that can be set aside.

Kanastrous wrote:

Darth Wong wrote:I'm saying that no one deserves lifetime royalties for anything. That's my point.

Okay. I disagree. There we are. If someone creates a life-saving cancer-obliterating drug, I wouldn't personally object to them receiving an indefinite royalty. If someone invents a revolutionary sex lube, I wouldn't object to such royalties for them, either. And obviously I feel the same regarding media content.

You honestly have no idea why there are time limits on patents, do you? Do you even pay the slightest nod to the concept of balance between the society and the individual?

Where such royalties impede distribution of life-saving items there's room for adjustment; I wouldn't place an indefinite right to royalties above human lives. But since that doesn't apply to any product created by writers, I think that can be set aside.

Yeah, I get it. "Me me me me me". I've heard this kind of thinking before. Usually from two years olds.

Darth Wong wrote: I'm saying that no one deserves lifetime royalties for anything. That's my point.

Can you explain what's wrong with the royalty compensation model? Is it just lifetime royalties you're against or royalties in general?

Big Orange wrote: It is unethical to steal something you can already buy, but it is also unethical to not distribute something because of stifling, unnecessary tariffs attached to it by other parties. It is appalling business sense and dangerously blocking up the natural flow of information. The studios are just getting no money out of consumers instead of some, through the inertia and bickering almost entirely caused by the music protection racket. The problem is not impossible and can be solved: the BBC has Ashes to Ashes available over the Internet free of charge and that's got a soundtrack.

I suppose here's an example with the problems of royalties, but why isn't this a problem of royalties that are too high/egregious, just like other methods of compensation are problematic when they are too high?

If someone doesn't mind explaining it I really want to know, because the royalty model being inherently bad never really crossed my consciousness before reading this thread.

PS: It was kinda amusing to see Kanastrous respond to a completely tangential comment about piracy that had nothing to do with royalties, and then Darth Wong modify that tangential piracy related response to bring the subject back to royalties, and then Kanastrous assuming that because Darth Wong modified a statement of his dealing with piracy that Darth Wong was interested in talking about piracy (maybe not an unreasonable assumption) and thus confusedly posting on piracy while Darth Wong reamed him for it. Hooray for miscommunication.

aimless wrote: I suppose here's an example with the problems of royalties, but why isn't this a problem of royalties that are too high/egregious, just like other methods of compensation are problematic when they are too high?

If someone doesn't mind explaining it I really want to know, because the royalty model being inherently bad never really crossed my consciousness before reading this thread.

Music royalties are bad because taken to the extreme (like is in America naturally) causes cultural impoverishment and commercial deadlock, with many great TV shows sunk without a trace. That is precisely why the music industry have become pariahs in recent years due their zealous guarding of their copyrighted music and excessive demands for royalty payment. I wager the greedy, paranoid antics of the Sony Corporation's music wing, BMG, must've bled into the rest of the company and made it into the glassy eyed basket case we all know today, and has cut off its nose in spite of its face so many times, Sony's mug must resemble the Crypt Keeper's.

Big Orange wrote:
Music royalties are bad because taken to the extreme (like is in America naturally) causes cultural impoverishment and commercial deadlock, with many great TV shows sunk without a trace. That is precisely why the music industry have become pariahs in recent years due their zealous guarding of their copyrighted music and excessive demands for royalty payment. I wager the greedy, paranoid antics of the Sony Corporation's music wing, BMG, must've bled into the rest of the company and made it into the glassy eyed basket case we all know today, and has cut off its nose in spite of its face so many times, Sony's mug must resemble the Crypt Keeper's.

Thanks for the elaboration, but I guess my main question was why royalties in general are a bad thing: ie it seems that the music royalty issue is more a matter of excess and bad handling.

The music royalties protection racket have gotten so ridiculous you've got music company representatives slinking round to businesses playing music over their radios and charities who sing Christmas carols, demanding them to pay up. Also allegedly the popular diddy, "Happy Birthday", was too expensive to be heard sung in Mark Achbar's documentary, The Corporation.

And back to the main topic of America's flagging broadcast networks: FOX was never the biggest of the so-called "Big Four", but one of its most recent flagship shows, Dollhouse, has netted a mere 2.5 million viewers and that is comparable to what Enterprise had only five or so years ago on the now defunct UPN network, yet amazingly FOX renewed it and that indicates how much in the shit they are now. And in better days, countless other shows with better ratings than Dollhouse have been cancelled by FOX. CBS cancelled Shark and that had over 10 million viewers, but they've got arrogant management who think they could take losses and admitedly they are in a better position, relative to the other three networks, yet they're in for a big fall when the CSI franchise is on the wane in next few years.