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Tim Lee came up with a great post title at Techdirt this morning: Titanic Crew Strikes Over Deck Chair Arrangement. It's a good lead into his blog-centric view of a standardized Hollywood writers contract:
The web is such a diverse and fast-changing medium that it's hard to imagine a contract that could address the diverse needs of all its writers right now, to say nothing of anticipating the future evolution of the industry.
Citing the same NY Times piece, Marc Andreessen points out several challenges faced by the media business:
faced with a massive, once-in-a-lifetime shift in mainstream consumer behavior from traditional mass media, including film and television, to new activities that you do not control: the Internet, social networking, user-generated content, mobile services, video games
He asks the "major media moguls":
Is this really the right time to pick a fight with the writers over royalties from DVD and Internet sales, leading to an industry-wide shutdown and massive economic pain for all sides in the world of traditional scripted film and television content?
Perhaps Marc has different sources? The NY Times article sounded like the other side was "picking a fight":
The sides have been at odds over, among other things, writers’ demands for a large increase in pay for movies and television shows released on DVD, and for a bigger share of the revenue from such work delivered over the Internet.
We report, you decide.
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We also will push for the percentage increases the US writers may receive on DVD and internet marketing but that won't happen until after the writers strike of 2007. So expect a Canadian version in late 2008, unless our producers realize that it is better to cede the percentage increases to Canadian writers than to stop the entire industry (everyone still remembers the National Hockey League strike a few years ago and that industry has yet to recover fully).
Just wanted to say that writers up north believe in the cause and just wish producers would share the pie better without the need for such drastic action, because if it were not for writers there would not be anything produced worth watching in the first place. --2E
Deciding which side was picking a fight is prime example of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. It doesn't matter -- the studio heads have it within their power to settle the strike in a matter of minutes, but they are too busy blaming Apple.