Monday, November 05, 2007 :::
 

Hollywood writers are on strike. I seem to remember reading somewhere that they have a point; this doesn't make it, unless you believe that this whiner's 19-cent check was the only compensation he ever received for his work.

This seems more fair:

The reason is "new media" - we are in the age of YouTube and no one knows where it's headed. Movie and television execs have seen the near demise of the music industry and it has struck fear in their hearts. It should. Their power has always stemmed from controlling the means of distribution. The Internet is threatening that. Soon enough the lunatics may be running the asylum – and if you've seen One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, you know what that means. (Don't worry: Jack will survive.)

For their part, the writers still smart over a negotiation a couple of decades ago when they foolishly took an incremental gain in minimums instead of a decent percentage of the videocassette royalties. At the time they thought that the home video market wasn't all it was cracked up to be. That lame-brained decision has had tremendous ramifications in the DVD era.

I'm not sure "lame-brained" is quite fair, either, actually; everything seems more obvious in hindsight.

::: posted by Steven at 7:29 PM

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Idle thoughts of a relatively libertarian Republican in Cambridge, MA, and whomever he invites. Mostly political.