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Post by dazz on Sept 14, 2018 13:31:19 GMT
They probably do not get paid or recognized; actors and writers got the shaft when it came to any kind of perpetuity for their work. I'm sure there were others, but I want to say Leonard Nemoy (Spock) was among those at the forefront, fighting for a better deal on those types of things; because back then royalties ended after something like, three airings of an episode. And forget radio; I can't say with certainty, but I doubt radio dramas even got repeats. Could also because an unpublished Superman story featured a kryptonite like substance they didn't name, which di things kryptonite has/can do such as drain Superman of his power and give powers to normal humans, so they could argue it wasn't an original creation of the radio show but an adapted element from unreleased works by the original writers.
But yeah people used to get ripped off a bunch, though at the same time some of this stuff is ridiculous imo, to think someone who sat on their butt and wrote some shit can get paid for it for the rest of their lives if people reuses stuff they wrote, even if what they wrote is just a rip off from something else and renamed, but you got labourers who break their backs building shit people will use for decades and they don't get paid a penny more than their hourly rate...so fucking weird, it's kind of funny doctors don't have some shit like that set up, like if a doctor saves your life they get like 0.1% of whatever you earn for the rest of yourl ife because if they didn't save you, you couldn't earn that money, I mean if you think about who deserves residuals it aint the writer in that instance...I know it's a wird tangent but my brains in one of them moods today.
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Post by stargazer1682 on Sept 14, 2018 14:56:08 GMT
I understand the value of the work of people who physically make things, but as a writer, I can't say I agree that writers don't deserve perpetual consideration for their work. An artist's process may not seem comparable to other forms of work, but it doesn't make it any less important in the contribution to the fabric of society. Plays, novels, paintings, etc. have influence people in profound ways, it can make people laugh, cry; art has inspired people, changed the way they talk and has even sparked revolutions. I mean, in your terms what's the big deal about the American Declaration of Independence; since Thomas Jefferson just "sat on his ass" and strung a bunch of words together? Fuck Shakespeare and Charles Dickens.
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Post by dazz on Sept 14, 2018 15:45:59 GMT
I understand the value of the work of people who physically make things, but as a writer, I can't say I agree that writers don't deserve perpetual consideration for their work. An artist's process may not seem comparable to other forms of work, but it doesn't make it any less important in the contribution to the fabric of society. Plays, novels, paintings, etc. have influence people in profound ways, it can make people laugh, cry; art has inspired people, changed the way they talk and has even sparked revolutions. I mean, in your terms what's the big deal about the American Declaration of Independence; since Thomas Jefferson just "sat on his ass" and strung a bunch of words together? Fuck Shakespeare and Charles Dickens. Didn't say they didn't deserve it, but the fact writers can earn forever off of one thing they wrote is weird, that other people using an aspect or element of something they are credited for can earn them money for a lifetime, the idea that the arts is where what you make or do can pay you for the remainder of your entire lifetime, but almost no other industry does is odd.
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Post by stargazer1682 on Sept 14, 2018 19:50:53 GMT
Not just writing, but basically anything you can copyright or patent - that's why drug prices are what they are, at least in the states.
And I don't completely disagree, copyright law has gotten out of hand; especially with so many corporations owning the rights to intellectual properties. But at the same time, I remember reading about instances of musicians who, prior to copyright extensions, might live to see their work fall into the public domain, when copyright terms were much shorter - which might not seem like a problem for a successful group like the Rolling Stones or the Beetles, who saw significant enough windfalls during the life of the initial copyright that it isn't going to leave them destitute, but it's another case for an author or songwriter who only saw a moderate amount of success with their work, and whose earnings provided a modest income, if that; and then all of sudden they're in their 70s or 80s and that income is gone. The intellectual property is still there, and profit could still be made from it, but they have no control over it, they see none of the revenue that may still be made - so to that end, why should those who put no effort into the actual production of a product reap the same level of the fruits of someone's work? That, I feel, could also be applied to large corporations, with executives who are paid obscene salaries, while people at the ground level actually providing the services or making the products are lucky if they're paid enough to live on.
But intellectual property is something unique; it's an idea, which can't really be quantified, because it is subjective. Yet ease of reproducing or distribution is such that we can readily take for granted it's potential value; even though something as simple and seemingly insignificant as an ad campaign can condition a culture to swish floor cleaner in their mouth to keep their breath fresh; or that an overly abundant formation of carbon is worth more than it really is, and belongs on every engagement ring. Someone's "idea" is why you probably took a shower today and just as likely washed your hair; and if you thought, "ew, why wouldn't I have showered today?" that's the power of an idea. Because a corporation wanted to sell more soap a bunch of decades ago and convinced people the need to bath more regularly than they already did, even though it can be damaging to the skin; and similarly frequently washing your hair is bad for your hair, but those business campaigns were so effective at ingraining an idea into our public consciousness that even knowing that fact isn't going to change anything.
Comparatively, imagine if a construction company built a house, and then the realtor not only sold it, but then sold 5 millions copies of that house, without any of the comparable labor that went into creating the original. At best their cost is just the materials, but the house just has to be built once in order to duplicate it endlessly. That might hurt whomever built it, because if you can just copy the house and reproduce it exactly without additional labor, that person or company has no need build more house and the value of that initial labor can go a couple of different ways. On the one hand, that work might seem diluted, because the time that goes into producing it might not seem commensurate to the benefit; they made the template, but that's it. While on the other hand, the value of that initial labor could be said to be more valuable, because it's impact goes farther; while the competency of the craftsmanship also increases the value of the work exponentially, because if the initial work is replicated exactly, every flaw, every cut corner is duplicated, and so is everything that is done right. This would only increase exponentially the value of good work in the initial labor, and invariably decrease the value of poor work. At least in the conventional production of construction, while better work is preferred, there's at least an opportunity to better the next time. With a publish story or movie or TV show, you get one shot that get final version right; and as many of the present DC shows proves, that's not always as easy as it sounds.
But to take that even further, imagine the person who built the original house had no control in its reproduction; and those who are reproducing it decide to make subtle changes like adding a coat of hideous paint that makes it look bad, or substandard material that compromises the quality that invariably affects your reputation as the original home builder. Or the market becomes so saturated by knock off variations of your original construction that the value becomes inflated and the original labor is no longer worth what it was?
And then, not only that, what if all of a sudden a technology evolves that allows people to share the home you built with other people for free; and suddenly anyone can have a copy of the home you built without even paying for it, and people think it's fine so long as they say, "I don't own the rights to this house and no infringement is intended"?
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Post by dazz on Sept 14, 2018 22:17:34 GMT
Yeah I wasn't trying to say people shouldn't make money off of the things they created, I even said some of this stuff is stupid, some not all, the people who created the great works or the vital fabrics of major characters or stories should be paid for it, the shit I find odd is the people who say write a screenplay adapting a prior work who then gets canned, the script goes through 4 rewrites including 2 from scratch can still get credits and maybe residuals, not too sure on that one, because they wrote the first draft of the adaption and the final product shares various similarities even though the reason for that is because they are both adapting the same source material.
Or in this case should or should not the creators of kryptonite get paid for their creation, or you know that weird dude who owns some of the Superman origin shit they have to pay anytime they use that in the films, I forgot his name, the guy Kevin Smith talks about his weird mech spider thing and who Nolan had banned from one of his movies or MOS or whatever, that's the stuff I find daft, sorry if you thought it was meant as an attack on writers it's not, probably been more clear in the first place, my bad.
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Post by stargazer1682 on Sept 14, 2018 23:43:23 GMT
Don't get me wrong, the comparison with say building a house or some other tangible thing isn't entirely without merit; and I've heard it before and it's a hard thing to try to make a case for something more esoteric. Something physical has quantifiable properties that can assess value. That's something I'm all too keenly aware of after losing my home to a fire this summer and taking stock of what's gone and what needs to be replaced; and appreciation of the work underway on our new house.
I do agree, things have gotten convoluted; and I think it boils down a lot to the involvement of companies and this creation of creativity by committee. It hardly seems like a pure process when, like you said, you have people writing and rewriting stuff, not for the sake of telling a story they feel needs to be told, but really they're just doing it for the sake of contriving something based on maximizing the financial value of the end result. And it's so weird. My example with the house and one building it once and then replicating it a million times was as a much about exploring the strange nature of intellectual property, which uniquely has that quality where the labor only comes once and once it's made can be duplicated with increasing ease. And I can't think of anything else in the world that's like that. Although come the day humanity develops matter replicators, that's going to be a different story....
I've been rewatching Deep Space Nine recently, and there's a fan wiki site, Memory Alpha, that has details on each episode, including background information; which usually goes into some level of depth on how the episode came to be written, the process and other things; and often times it'll talk about how one writer did the final re-write of an episode un-credited, or they had bought a story concept from someone that made a pitch, only for the story to evolve into something else entirely; and at times bears no resemblance to what was pitched. Yet the person or people who made the pitch get the story credit, the only writer gets the written by credit and it's all very dissonant. Some of the story pitches for episodes I've seen probably a dozen times sound so completely different, I thought, "I would have liked to have seen that episode." Not because the episode that ended up being made was bad, but because they still could have run with the original concept and made an entirely separate episode and no one would have known it inspired two episodes. But then who knows, they might have to pay the story person a second time.
I do get that to a degree; for one, it's ostensibly part of the whole "derivative work" premise under copyright law. You can take a work from the public domain and make changes to it, and those changes become yours and a new copyright is created, but the original work, whatever remains, still falls into the public; and in a way acknowledges the work of those who crafted what came before and is being built on. If you invert that and build on something that isn't under copyright, something that was just created for the first time, even if not published produced for public conception (say, a first draft to a movie, which doesn't get filmed or released), by writing it, it's under copyright. To build on that is to build on something that has standing in society, even if no one gets to see it. The saving grace, I think, is that at least the credit goes to those doing the work creating the drafts, rather than how it was in the early 20th century, where company holds the rights over everything and the writers are just contractors with no claim for what they created; which is how Siegel and Shuster got screwed over on Superman.
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Post by General Kenobi on Sept 23, 2018 17:18:10 GMT
Yeah, copyright exists to help creators but it's been exploited by companies.
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Post by Deleted on Sept 24, 2018 11:59:18 GMT
They probably do not get paid or recognized; actors and writers got the shaft when it came to any kind of perpetuity for their work. I'm sure there were others, but I want to say Leonard Nemoy (Spock) was among those at the forefront, fighting for a better deal on those types of things; because back then royalties ended after something like, three airings of an episode. And forget radio; I can't say with certainty, but I doubt radio dramas even got repeats. Sadly, you are probably right Stargazer and I agree with your following posts about writers should be getting paid for their creations over multi-billion dollar companies who are getting enough money on a daily basis from everybody ‘cause if it wasn’t for them those characters or attributes wouldn’t exist and looking at Bill Finger and how many decades it took for DC to acknowledge him as the co-creator of Batman kinda makes me wonder just how many other co-creators of these comic book characters have gone unacknowledged over the years like there could have been more people who created The Flash, X Men or Wonder Woman for example whose names we don’t know ‘cause they were shafted by the company they were working for and with Bill finger it wasn’t until years and years later (after he died) his name was finally acknowledged which was horrible.
I imagine it probably feels much worse for writers who have created really popular characters when they are not only unpaid for them but their names aren’t even associated with them and that to me would be very insulting and I am not sure about the full story of Bill Finger but was there some type of falling out between him and DC which was why they never acknowledged him for co-creating the character of ‘Batman’ ‘cause they acknowledged him co-created other characters like the Joker so it is confusing to me why they wouldn’t acknowledge that years ago. I didn’t know that about Leonard Nemoy but I was aware a lot of actors in old TV shows were screwed out of money by the networks and the casts of ‘The Partridge Family’ and ‘Gilligan’s Island’ were two I have heard tricked by people into signing deals that prevented them from getting a lot of the money they should have got later. I saw a documentary about 'The Partridge Family' one time with my Aunt and David Cassidy and the rest of the cast really had a number done on them.
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Post by Deleted on Sept 24, 2018 12:04:03 GMT
Yeah, copyright exists to help creators but it's been exploited by companies. And slightly changed and rearranged in long documents to benefit the companies more than the creators and there is a good reason why people now say never sign your name to anything unless you have read it down to the bottom letter 'cause they can add all kinds of things in tiny writing that can swindle somebody out of millions of dollars.
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Post by General Kenobi on Sept 24, 2018 13:46:08 GMT
Heck, forget reading it yourself. Have a lawyer go over it. They're really good at knowing whta to look for so you don't get screwed.
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Post by Deleted on Oct 4, 2018 13:22:22 GMT
Heck, forget reading it yourself. Have a lawyer go over it. They're really good at knowing whta to look for so you don't get screwed. Yeah. That would be the best idea. Some of them are swifty and experienced with screwing people over to the point where they can write something on a contract which most people would think was one thing and not another unless they analysed them thoroughly and it is better to be safer than sorry. It is sad how many people in the entertainment industry have been screwed over by people in high up positions over the years and they make out it is some wonderful place but behind the scenes is another story.
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Post by dazz on Oct 5, 2018 13:54:36 GMT
Thing to me is a lot of that contract double talk shit should be illegal, make it straight forward because so much of that shit only exist to confuse and con people into signing stuff without fully understanding it.
Although I think that can happen like if you can prove the phrasing or even the parameters of the contract are as such that no one could be believed to have knowingly agreed to the stipulations you can get a lot of shit thrown out, it just costs a lot of money to fight these things, but is also why big companies will settle out of court because if it goes to trial and a verdict laid down that this contract is bullshit it opens the doors for others, so they'll settle out of court for a cut of what is being asked for and that way they can continue to bamboozle people with legal mumbo jumbo that wont actually stand up in court.
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Post by stargazer1682 on Oct 5, 2018 14:11:13 GMT
It's arguably a fine line to walk; with any sort of legal document you don't want to leave any room for ambiguity, which means using less common, but more specific words, as well a pattern of language that may seem tedious and wordier than we might normally deem necessary. I was at a meeting for a group recently that is trying to revive a community event, and they were going over the original charter and quibbled over the phrasing of one section because it talked about the types of groups that could be on the board; and it was along the lines of, "or this type of group, or this type of group, or that type of group" and they questioned the need of all those "or's," because in conventional grammar it may not be correct or be how normal people would speak to each other, but presumably it's necessary from a legal standpoint to separate each body for specific inclusion.
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Post by General Kenobi on Oct 5, 2018 18:55:53 GMT
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Post by Deleted on Oct 19, 2018 11:18:33 GMT
Thing to me is a lot of that contract double talk shit should be illegal, make it straight forward because so much of that shit only exist to confuse and con people into signing stuff without fully understanding it. Although I think that can happen like if you can prove the phrasing or even the parameters of the contract are as such that no one could be believed to have knowingly agreed to the stipulations you can get a lot of shit thrown out, it just costs a lot of money to fight these things, but is also why big companies will settle out of court because if it goes to trial and a verdict laid down that this contract is bullshit it opens the doors for others, so they'll settle out of court for a cut of what is being asked for and that way they can continue to bamboozle people with legal mumbo jumbo that wont actually stand up in court. I agree. I have no idea how they have been able to get away with it for so many years and nobody has ever put a stop to it before or at least tried but it is something that happens in multiple countries with contracts and not just America and here in Australia and over in your country there have been people screwed the exact same way for years but perhaps there is something that protects it. Who knows? What I do now is they think some people are stupid and they can get away with it without being detected and that is why they do it and they often don't come up with these contracts themselves and hire professionals to help them add all these shifty clauses into them. I have seen them do it in movies and TV shows and after somebody signs the contract and leaves they jump around the room dancing and celebrating over tricking them and they are very mischievous people who cannot be trusted.
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Post by General Kenobi on Oct 21, 2018 13:03:46 GMT
It's legal mumbo jumbo designed to confuse people to protect the companies ass.
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Post by Deleted on Nov 11, 2018 11:05:05 GMT
It's legal mumbo jumbo designed to confuse people to protect the companies ass. Well, that is a pretty blunt and direct way of saying it but you are right and it makes me wonder if it happens more of less often nowadays before 'cause more people know what companies are capable of but there are also a lot of naive people and people like that love the naive 'cause they can pull the sheets over their eyes and drain them for everything they are worth.
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Post by BexxyJ on Nov 15, 2018 14:16:45 GMT
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