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Battlestar Galactica 'Webisodes' Conflict Brewing
nebaz writes "MSNBC has an article saying that there is tension between NBC and Ron Moore and team about the royalties on the 'Webisodes' of Battlestar Galactica. The episodes have been seized by NBC, balking at Ron Moore's refusal to produce any more episodes, due to compensation issues."
FTA: "NBC Universal, the studio behind "Battlestar," refused to pay residuals or credit the writers of these "Webisodes," claiming they're promotional materials. So "Battlestar" executive producer Ron Moore said he wouldn't deliver any more of them, including the 10 that were already in the can."
10 refers to the Webisodes, not to the episodes of Season 3 running on SciFi itself.
This is an industry-wide battle between creatives and network/studio execs that goes way beyond this one show. Most of the unions completely messed up years ago negotiating residuals for the home markets (VHS and DVDs especially), so there's a LOT of resistence to giving away the farm this time. (Many writers, for example, in movie animation get zero residuals.) Unfortunately, there's a lot of momentum and precedents that resulted from the previous mistakes, so it's kind of an uphill battle for the writers, directors, actors guilds. The future gets even more complicated when writers, actors, and other artists work directly for the Internet, for phones, for games, etc. and when "reality" shows claim to not have writers at all or won't allow their writers to organize. Plus there's the issue of residuals for older content that wasn't even imagined when the shows were produced in the first place.
So yeah, it's a mess, and there's gonna be conflict in this arena for a while.
DC Comics pulled a similar stunt on Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons with Watchmen badges ("pins" to the American audience). The badges were sold in comic stores and used the iconic designs that Moore had envisioned and Gibbons had illustrated. DC Comics happily cashed the proceeds but did not send any of the profits to Moore and Gibbons since these were "promotional items." Alan Moore did not react well to this....
One of the other issues is that revenue is not a standard term. If it were then you could negotiate that you garner a specific percentage of that revenue.
The problem is that no one will do gross. That is reasonable - there are many places where a real gross is really really high and the real net is zero or a loss. Take advertising for instance - pretty much all a loss (and this is where the OP is talking about). While it is purely a cost, it still increases net revenue by quite a bit.
If you do net then the studios play with costs - every thing becomes one and non-solid costs are greatly inflated. Say, for instance, one could say the five minutes by the studio exec to read over a document and sign it cost the company 5 million, to be deducted from the gross (and since it grossed 4 million that is a loss). Therefore you get no money. This occurs quite often.
If the studios were somewhat honest this wouldn't be such an issue. You could simply do a percentage of net income (or maybe even gross income). However the powers that be try and actively screw people out of money and are in a position to do so easily. Do all of them do it? I do not know - I suspect there are honest players out there who figure a happy well compensated employee makes you MUCH more than a screwed one (which is very true). However from my view it seems pretty much all the big players do not do this - including trying hard line DRM initiatives that screw customers (read - the RIAA and MPAA).
Eh, this is what a union is for. I've seen many cases where unions demand unreasonable ideas (it has resulted in more than one company moving labor out of country). Yet, this is precisely what they are intended to fix. If nearly everyone decides to do this there is no choice, if enough choose to go around the union then maybe it isn't that harsh on you and you need to re-evaluate your complaints. That's a free market for you.
------- Sorry about the spelling, I suffer from two problems. Dyslexia makes it difficult to spell well, lazy makes it