Bottom line is that there are only so many productions done in a single year. There are more writers than slots. No writer that I know is earning a traditional salary. Not only is the business dicey, but planning for retirement is tough going. The current system give those writers whose work is still earning money for the producers a share in the money. I don’t think it’s optimal.

However, as both of us have noted, in the collaborative environment of movie-making (TV show making), assigning copyright is near-impossible. But someone must be the copyright holder — to have five or ten or two copyright holders turns the whole act of licensing products to various media outlets a logistic (and expensive) nightmare. For better or worse, the copyright holder is the studio (or producer). Sharing the traditional benefits of copyright becomes more complex. The current system sort of, kind of fills the gap.

My position is that all writers deserve fair compensation for their work. On the flip side, it’s hard to determine fair compensation. You’re calling out a specific type of writing that’s not covered by the guild agreement. I can’t tell if you think it should be — I do, because right now the current contractual structure doesn’t give you much recourse while the current selling/revenue environment provides plenty of opportunity for the producer to make money.

I understand why WGA members who write for non-represented programming are counted as unemployed. For the purposes of collective bargaining, only work performed under the terms of the agreement can be considered. Every contract has parameters. While I have my own feelings about how creative endeavors should be compensated, I believe that negotiations between contracting parties need to follow the rules of engagement. Expand the rules to include other types of writing and I fully support this. I think many of the non-covered writing should be folded into the negotiations.

TV writers aren’t on-call or on stand-by alert. Staff writers very seldom write a script–from concept to final shooting script–by themselves. Someone else came up with the characters, the season’s story bible, and then each episode is hashed out in the writers’ room. Then someone or a team write a script. So who owns that copyright?

Most of the basic cable doc. and how-to shows are written by non-union writers as for-hire, and while we’d love to get WGA rates, ain’t never going to happen. I know plenty of Guild members who write these shows and are glad to do so. They’re all at work, but the WGA counts them when they claim the numbers–and counts them as “unemployed”.

Oh, it’s permissible alright. The authors most probably sold “electronic publishing rights” as that’s the most common wording in ‘net contracts. What most folks think that means is “anything published on a website”. What they don’t realise is that the courts have upheld that to mean anything published outside of the print realm.

Uh, well, that would depend entirely on the size of that flat sum.

Kidding aside, Booksquare, here’s something that may interest you: The authors of the popular Online Reads at eHarlequin have always been paid a flat fee for those stories. The authors were led to believe their stories would always be available for free online, and many sent their faithful readers over to eHarlequin to check them out. But last year when Harlequin began offering e-books, many of those old Online Reads were removed from that free library and recycled as income-producing e-books on which the authors received no royalties. I have always thought that was a stinky move because many of the authors had accepted those contracts (at least in part) because they wanted the online exposure for their writing.

A certain percentage of income was previously deemed fair for the artist and producer, because of how much production cost. Production costs have dropped, but artist payment hasn’t raised accordingly.

My impulse is to say that someone who expects a writer to be on-call should at least pay some sort of retainer fee, but when I think about the logistics, I’m not sure if that could work. Perhaps a better option would be to allow people involved to get other jobs “just in case” that can be dropped if things go well. It would slow down production, probably, but it might increase job security.

Of course, the current setup seems to be very good to producers, so I don’t think they’re going to be changing anything anytime soon.