As someone who hopes to go off into the wild blue yonder and be a writer, I pay some attention to the Writers Guild.

For those not in the know, Hollywood has a writers guild, an actors guild, a directors guild, and then the 3 or so huge media conglomerates who own everything. And all these folks need to sign agreements and decide how money gets worked out.

I think a lot of people’s default reactions now a days is to sort of instinctively hate unions, and so I’m sure the concept of a bunch of wealthy writers in a union sounds pretty stupid. But it makes a lot of sense when you realize how insanely far the studios are willing to go to cheat movie makers out of, what is to the studio, tiny amounts of money.

Anyway, the next time there’s a writers guild strike, you can be sure it’ll be over exactly this. This is as crystal clear an example of what’s gonna happen as you can find. Basically it’s all about the internet and other forms of digital transmission.

Essentially the studios are supposed to pay writers residuals for their work (when it appears on TV and in DVDs and whatnot), but the current contracts don’t cover the internet at all, so studios have taken the stance that writers shouldn’t get money for things like having their movie sold on iTunes.

The example I’ve linked to is especially interesting because you’ve got a TV show (Battlestar Galactica) which released miniature episodes of the show on the internet, and the studio has not only refused to pay residuals, but in fact claims that the mini-episodes do not count as writing because they were only made for "promotional purposes." 

Hopefully these sort of things get worked out fairly, but I think the studios are probably going to be willing to put all the writers out of work for a year just to money grub for as long as they can (perhaps hoping to fill time with reality TV or god knows what else, which would be awful since reality TV is pretty terrible right now).

Maybe if I’m lucky they’ll have all this stuff worked out by the time I don’t suck anymore and can sell stuff (though it’s worth noting that my first ever sale of anything was, in fact, web content that falls exactly under this sort of trouble).