We live in an age of access. We have the resources and the means to access virtually anything we want. We have Web sites like Yahoo, Google, Wikipedia and YouTube - sites that put almost any form of media or bit of information just a few keystrokes or mouse clicks away. And this is made possible by user-created material. These people share media and information for one reason: They believe in a free exchange of ideas. These people are from all walks of life; it's not their line of work, but they create for the sake of creating. Most of the time, the only compensation someone gets for posting or sharing anything online is that others will do the same.
There are others, however, who create for money. Their job is to come up with material for an audience. They're called writers. And when they aren't being paid for the material they create, they lose the incentive. And America's writers have officially lost their incentive.
Early last week, the Writer's Guild of America, which mainly consists of film and television writers on the east and west coasts, decided it had enough and went on strike. The writers were not being paid for the material they had written that was being put online.
In television, writers generally get paid every time material they created is shown. For example, if a writer wrote for "Full House" in the early nineties, he got paid for each episode plus every time that it was rerun. When the show went into syndication, the station that bought the rights agreed to pay the writer every time one of his episodes aired. The money is divided up between writers, producers, etc. So when all is said and done, a writer gets a handful of change every time an episode he penned is aired. Although this doesn't seem like much, consider that a show like "Full House" has been off the air for 12 years but has been in constant, agonizing syndication since then. Odds are, right now, somewhere in the world, some station is showing some lame episode of "Full House." Even if a writer for that show got a few odd cents every time a station aired the episode where Stephanie drives Joey's car into the kitchen, by now he'd be close to millionaire status.
But recently, episodes of television shows are being put online, as opposed to traditional viewing. And since most writers' contracts date back to before this practice started, studios and companies aren't contractually obligated to pay their writers extra for online material. Many Internet episodes still have corporate sponsorship and paid advertisements, but none of that money has to go to the writers so, naturally, it doesn't.
Putting shows and content on the Internet is virtually unregulated, and this is a problem. Although striking is usually ideological overkill, this writers strike is more of a way of demanding corporations acknowledge new media and compensate people responsible for its substance. Right now, new Internet media is kind of a legal no-man's land, and all the writers are asking for is a system that gives them a fair chance to work within that medium professionally. And until that happens, they aren't going to write.
The entertainment industry has come to a near standstill. Writers are the cornerstone of every medium of entertainment; when they aren't working, nobody else can. We're faced with a lesser-of-two evils dilemma: would we rather live in a world with limited and restricted access to new media or a world filled with even more "Home Improvement" reruns?
Write to Paul at pjmetz@bsu.edu
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