> "I come to the conclusion about the artificiality of the divide
> between creative and below the line workers after studying the history
> of set designers and their attempts to unionize in the old Congress of
> Studio Unions. When the set designers were most powerful in their
> union -- roughly during the period of World War II -- they asserted
> real creative influence over the movies they were involved in and
> could be considered one part of a "collective of authors." (I have
> written about these subjects at length at my weblog. In short the
> "auteur theory" is mostly a description of the result of an historical
> struggle which acknowledged the "managerial" cult of the
> director-as-unit-foreman instead of investigating how collective
> authorship could be credited to all creative workers.) In other words,
> if copyright exists in creative works produced by the entertainment
> industry, then all workers should share in the continuing benefits of
> those copyrights during the whole life and in all the uses of that
> copyright
> Jerry Monaco
Thanks for the really excellent post, Jerry. I'm finishing up a grant proposal today on copyrights and intellectual property, so your thoughts should help get my neurons a-firing.
I support the writer's strike but I'm also an anti-copyright/IP activist. I think that the writers should be compensated fairly for their labor, even more so if the media companies stand to make billiosn from derivative copies of this cultural work. Writers and other workers in the cultural industries don't get paid enough as it is--just look at how much profit these companies make. As Jon Stewart pointed out the other night, it's not like the media companies can't afford to share a few billion.
In the long run, we really need an anti-capitalist system where the corporations are taken out of the picture. I think this will happen sooner than we think--if Hollywood is already worried about this happening with the disruptive Internet technologies, then it's very possible that a big shift may happen. It would be better if thing like movies were created by collectives, where all the workers involved could freely share the risk and the rewards from their cultural projects.
I'd also like to see more critique of Hollywood and the media companies as cartels. Even with new technologies it's not easy to do a DIY movie and get distribution. The situation may get easier for the distro, what with broadband being ubiquitous, but then the communications corporations may institute new restrictions on Internet usage.
Chuck