I’ve always viewed it that replays keep their face in the public arena disrupting privacy. If you film something 20 years ago, and then all of a sudden it becomes hugely popular again via streaming you will also be propelled back into the public arena which can have negative effects on your life (unable to go out without paparazzi, interference from strangers etc).

And that’s also a choice that should be factored in.

I would think it has to do with the IP owners using the likeness of the actors to continue to market the show year after year.

Does your employer get to use code you wrote after they pay you? Do they get to market features you worked for after you leave?

Do landlords get to collect rent on buildings after the architects are paid to design it?

Both of those things are also bad.

So you are saying that landlords should have to pay the original architects of the buildings part of their rental income?

Are you okay with paying residuals to every library author when you use an npm package?

1. There shouldn't be landlords.

2. Copyright shouldn't exist at all, but until it's abolished I am not opposed to a system where revenue is shared with the developers of any libraries you use. Although I think such a system would be difficult to manage and track.

Why do authors receive royalty every time their book is sold?

Likely because it's less risky for the publisher, as opposed to a big up-front payment for something that might not sell as well as expected. As an author, which approach would you prefer?

Definitely I'd want residual income. To avoid the opportunity cost in case one of my works become bestseller.

Would you take less money up front in exchange?

And that’s something that everyone here fails to understand. For me there are three levels of risk.

1. Getting all of my compensation in cash (least downside/least upside)

2. Working for a publicly traded company where part of my compensation comes from RSUs vested over a schedule

3. Working for a startup where I get “equity” instead of my market value in cash.

The writers are negotiating based on 3. I would be negotiating based on 1.

> The writers are negotiating based on 3. I would be negotiating based on 1.

Are you, anonymous internet rando "scarface_74", claiming to know the interests of the Hollywood writers better than the writers themselves?

No I’m anonymous scarface_74 who knows finance and risk/rewards ratios based on being an MBA drop out.

I have had the same choices:

1. Being risk averse by taking cash up front and choosing to negotiate based on a maximum up front payment

2. Taking less up front and dealing with a higher risk/reward return like accepting lower payer for equity by working for a startup

> No I’m anonymous scarface_74 who knows finance and risk/rewards ratios based on being an MBA drop out.

It's truly a wonder that you haven't been made the President of the Writer's Guild of America.

> Taking less up front and dealing with a higher risk/reward return like accepting lower payer for equity by working for a startup

Hollywood studios are not startups, and residuals are not like startup equity. Writers and actors are not hoping for some BigCo to come along and buy the Hollywood studios, or for the studios to go public, leading to a massive single payday. The studios are the BigCos, and they're already public. Residuals are more analogous to BigCo stock than to startup equity.

The choice for the writers are the same. Take less up front for a higher risk/reward if the show is successful and get a continuous income stream or take more up front and don’t the studios have the risk of the show being successful in returns of higher rewards.

Whether the studios are public is irrelevant. What is relevant is the success of the movies/tv shows being successful.

> or take more up front

From https://www.sagaftra.org/were-fighting-survival-our-professi...

Us: We need an 11% general wage increase in year 1 so our members can recover from record inflation during the previous contract term.

Them: The most we will give you is 5%, even though that means your 2023 earnings will effectively be a significant pay cut due to inflation and it is likely you will still be working for less than your 2020 wages in 2026.

And that has nothing to do with residuals.

They could just as easily negotiate for no increase in pay for larger residuals that most people here are focused on.

My point is that there's no magical massive upfront pay increase forthcoming that would make up for lost residuals. That was never on the table at any time. There's no way for actors and writers to avoid getting screwed if they don't get residuals. And it's pretty clear why that's not on the table: big upfront payments are a big risk to the studios, even more so than the risks they already take, so it's not good for them either. There's a good reason this system has existed for a long time.

The status quo favors the studios, because they're finding new ways to avoid paying the residuals, while not offering anything else to take their place.

How are residuals from streaming working out for musicians on Spotify getting $.0006 per stream? Why would it magically work out better for most writers instead of suffering the same power law where the Taylor Swifts gets most of the money?

> How are residuals from streaming working out for musicians on Spotify getting $.0006 per stream?

Musicians need to unionize and strike again, like the did to establish the royalty system originally. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1942%E2%80%9344_musicians%27_s...

That's the difference here. Striking gets the goods. Musicians have been complacent.

And how would unionization help? Spotify already gives 70% of its revenue to artists and those revenues are split based on the number of streams played. You’re still going to have the Taylor Swifts of the world getting the bulk of the money.

Musicians need to force Spotify to raise its price to consumers substantially, or if that can't happen, then frankly, they need to drive Spotify out of business. As I said, this is an existential risk for recording artists, so it may be a choice between Spotify going out of business or recording artists going out of business.

Streaming services are too cheap. The price of buying one album is approximately $10, but for the same price a consumer can get practically every album in the world for a month on Spotify. That's not sustainable for musicians. Their music is being given away for peanuts. It's a race to the bottom, and it has to stop. It's not a matter of how to divide up Spotify's pie, because Spotify is only a mini-pie, and that's not enough to feed everyone. They need to bake a bigger pie.

It was never clear that Spotify and Apple Music were in the interest of the music industry. And you can see in the film and TV industry that the studios are pulling their content from Netflix and moving it in-house, which forces Netflix to produce their own content. Spotify and Netflix were clever in taking advantage of cheap content, and the industry was slow to react, but now there needs to be a counter-reaction to the fleecing of artists.

It sucks for them too! Most artists aren't Taylor Swift or Eminem and have enough clout to own their own label AND be an extremely successful artist.

Because that’s the contract they sign and they own the rights to the book. Actors don’t own the rights to the movies.

Actors and writers deserve meaningful residual income just like the authors. And they actually did, as a result of a similar strike in the 60s. The model was disrupted due to the advent streaming as the dominant media, so they are merely asking for a correction.

Are the writers of the libraries software developers used owed a continuous royalty based on how profitable the software built using it makes?

The author of a book could just as easily negotiate a large payment up front to give up rights to their book in exchange of one lump sum and invest their money and let the publisher both take all of the upside. But get all of the downside.

You keep repeating this as if it was actually an easy feat. No, aside from already famous established actors you won't just "negotiate a way better perfect contract upfront".

This is where the capital power imbalance cannot be defeated. They always have the upper hand against any single individual.

because once made, distributing the thing and making more money is trivial. So, getting an ongoing cut of the proceeds is important.

side note, this also means software engineers at large companies are getting screwed and should unionize.

imagine it takes $2M to make something, and in the first year it makes $4M. Then, every year after it, it's made $.5M.

Either: A) we give actors residuals or B) copyright should expire and movies should be free after the initial crowdfunding.

> because once made, distributing the thing and making more money is trivial. So, getting an ongoing cut of the proceeds is important.

But why are you so fixated on "getting an ongoing cut"? Thanks to finance, we can calculate the net present value of any perpetual income stream. There's nothing really different between getting paid $1000, and getting paid $500 + perpetual income stream that has a net present value of $500.

> Most other professionals get paid for the hours they work and then we either have to keep working or invest some of our earnings to have enough to live on

When people talk about the rich pitting the working class against each other, this is exactly what they're talking about. Rather than saying "yeah, fuck the man, we're all in this together!", you've chosen "why should they get out of eating the shit of our owners? They should learn to eat shit just like the rest of us!"

It’s not “the man” who all should get residuals? Building architects every time someone stays in a building they designed? Software engineers every time you use a library?

Are you okay with software patents and licensing? Do you think library makers should get a residual every time you pull a library down from npm?