While I will post the link to the tweet be aware that there a like 100 blue check bootlickers defending Netflix here https://twitter.com/SaeedDiCaprio/status/1699136050331799627
this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2023
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Here's a list of tons of leftist movies.
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Why should he be earning anything from it at this point anyway? If I'm paid to build a barn for a farmer, I'm not entitled to a percentage of the farmers profits every year he uses the barn. It's his barn, I just worked to create it. If I'm the camera guy on a movie, I don't get residuals for years afterwards. I get paid for my labour and then move on to the next job.
Aaron Paul did a stellar job playing Jessie in Breaking Bad, but why does that entitle him to rent every time the character is shown somewhere? He was already paid handsomely for his labour. Why should he be paid more when he's no longer working on it?
Huh?! This is a shit take and mind bogglingly ignorant. Your logic is even flawed.
How are residuals controversial? In the arts it is standard performers, artists, and writers to get some form of royalty due to their work being so fungible.
Exactly! It's a barn and not a fully fungible product like a painting, photo, music, movie, television show, or book. The barns value is easy to determine and negotiate the price of up front. That farmer can't take that barn the worker builds and copy it literally a billion times depending on how popular it turns out to be with farm livestock. If the farmer wants another barn, they have to hire the worker again.
With products of the arts the fair value of a performer, artist, or writers labor cannot be fully known until after the end product has been distributed and that determination of value is even further complicated by the product being fully fungible.
For union projects, the producers, which is whoever is paying the crew at any given time, pays an additional percentage based on revenue into what is called the lAP. This is in addition to their nominal pension benefits.
To quote Mao Tse Tung:
The fungability of art and entertainment is not a point I had even thought of before that, because I wasnt really sure how to respond to the barn point myself. Cool.
Yeah. It's not even like software where the value can often be roughly estimated upfront based on features/scope and the end product will always require steady maintenance work to keep in a useable state. A lot of art if successful is an evergreen fungible product, which further separates it from fungible media such as writing by a journalist whose product often only has significant value during the time period of its initial publication.
Am I not allowed to ask questions as part of my investigations?
I personally work in two creative fields (photography and software design) and in neither case are royalties a normal thing. If I take photographs of your new product so you can advertise it or build a website to help you sell it then I'm paid for the job I do, not based on the amount of money you make afterwards. The full value of my creations cannot be determined until years afterwards, but that doesn't change anything.
The value of labour is not always dependent on the value of the finished product. If it was then a truck driver hauling a load of computer parts would be paid hundreds of times more than one hauling grain.
There is nothing wrong with choosing to be paid royalties, but there isn't an automatic entitlement to them on moral grounds. Choosing to sell your labour or creative works for a fixed fee is a perfectly valid option, but if you do you shouldn't complain when the farmer starts using the barn as a restaurant and starts making ten times more money from it
So I'm not really well read at all, but for the sake of learning I'll try to engage.
In your point about the barn becoming a restaurant, one thing to consider is the status of the building does not change without additional labour. This is what would be compensated for and at some agreed upon rate. As well, the nature of how a restaurant works is not the same as a creative work I think. If the barn was considered a piece of art and appraisals were being done, I think that would be a different story and you could imagine there would be some contention over whether the builder would be compensated additionally, perhaps through acknowledgment (which could be the causus belli for the builder and may be vehemently opposed) of their work being the at the very least involved in the cause of the thing that is being appraised.
its not about moral grounds. its about class struggle and the bare minimum for a union is defending hard won gains for the working class. your example with the truckers doesn't translate because no union truckers (that I know of) have had such a battle won that would guarantee residuals on what is being transported. what is not a winnable battle in one sector is a winnable battle in another. the question really is which side of the fight are you on?
if you are a small business owner you are not in the same position as a worker that is part of a union that has a negotiated contract, so I can see how you think you have no leg to stand on when asking for residuals but what it ultimately comes down to is always leverage and with collective action workers have more leverage than you would on the open market as a freelancer, for example
that said, though, there are attempts at unionizing platform freelance workers such as people that work through platforms such as fiver or upwork, etc. i haven't kept up on how well they are going but you could reach out to union organizers where you are located to talk to them about that
If we apply this consistently then Netflix shouldn't be earning anything from it at this point either.
The issue being presented is workers not being paid fairly for their labour, while someone else cashes in on it forever. If everyone involved in the production owned it, then everyone involved in the production would continue to be paid a small amount for the rights to it. If this were music a lot of people would say "yes the artists involved in the production of the art should receive royalties".
My take is that if the art is gated and costs people money to access it, then the artists should be receiving that. But, I also fundamentally disagree with gating art whatsoever, all of this content should be free after the initial release run. And all of the services like netflix could combined into one single centralised government archive of entertainment culture anyone can access at any time for any reason for free.
God the DREAM.
Can you imagine? Never again losing a book because the "rights" and"ownership" are unclear so no one will publish it for fear of lawsuit? Not losing movies because some skin suit full of beetles decided it wasn'tprofitable to retain?
I don’t even need the central government repository. Just don’t devote billions of dollars to attacking hobby archivists. The only reason most popular TV shows and movies don’t dedicated websites serving copies of every single variation and edit and remaster that’s even been released is because of bullshit copyright law. People will do this stuff on their own for free because they love it. And if capitalists can’t enclose that ecosystem, they destroy it.
Well for one, because residuals are an industry standard for a reason. The fact that residuals dont exist for streaming services is seen as a problem by these workers, and we should support them.
Second, because corporations are making huge profits off recycling the labor of these workers. And not all of the workers involved are making money like Aaron Paul does. SAG-AFTRA doesn't just represent superstar actors that make millions. Corporations are making continued profit off a person's work and with streaming services they are the ONLY ones making those profits. The workers are only asking for a slice of that, which is less than they should be asking for.
To be clear, I think the camera guy should get residuals too. I think everyone involved should. The barn example is an interesting one because it does bring to mind that entertainment workers differently from other industries in this way, but at the end of the day I support the union in whatever they seek to get from the filthy capitalist pigs lol.
This is really the core point imo. The people who work these jobs want better conditions. They have come together collectively to make demands. Streaming residuals are part of their demands. Uncritical support.
We can get into the wonkery of the specifics of the labor value of various kinds of work and their theoretical value, etc, but the bottom line is that no one knows the work better than the people who perform that work. And those people have spoken, are speaking, and will continue to do so until they get what they’re entitled to.
I fully support the workers protesting for whatever form of payment they want. There's no reason why streaming services shouldn't pay residuals if that's what the workers want.
That doesn't mean they're entitled to additional compensation for labour they've already done. If they did the work for an agreed price that wasn't linked to the future profits then they shouldn't complain just because the future profits are greater than expected. Equally if you take your compensation as a share of the future profits, you can't complain if they're lower than expected.
The grey area in all this is when contracts have been badly worded and the rights holders are trying to use these loopholes unfairly. If someone negotiated to be paid $X every time an episode is aired, it creates a big problem with the rise of non-broadcast TV. It's not realistic to claim that a show is 'aired' every time a single person streams it, but equally it's not fair say they aren't being aired at all just because they're streaming on demand instead.
I don't know what the best solution is. Future contracts will certainly be worded with streaming mind, but what (if anything) should be done about previous contracts is a much more difficult issue.
The best solution is shooting all the CEO's in the process of overthrowing capitalism and de-comodifying entertainment so everyone's needs are met and we can make art for the love of beauty and not because it'll make some rich person even more money.
Yeah, see, the problem is the old contracts were made before streaming was a thing so its hard to say "you agreed to the contract so you deal with the consequences".
Also I think my other comrades point about "the value of art is fungible" is really important here to respond to "they shouldn't complain just because the future profits are greater than expected" part of this.
Plus tbh I'd just rather the money go to the actors who actually put in the work to get these projects done than the suits who did nothing at all and are useless to society lol. Profit sucks. Anything that takes away profit and gives it to the workers is good to me.
You do realize projects are budgeted, and the studios say. “We don’t have money to do that” so they don’t pay people a lot upfront, and offer the actors and writers packages to get paid once the project is completed. This is how it worked for a century and then streaming came in and offered these two groups nothing.
People are paying for the streaming services for the content of shows and movies they hold, not because of software choices by streaming services. So if those are the breadwinners, and Netflix is making ads showing off their breaking bad content, then I thin it’s okay for them to want royalties from these services.
The solution is to make streaming services like TV packages where everyone pays $80 a month.
I agree everything should go into the public domain after a couple years. Glad to find someone equally opposed to intellectual property monopoly capitalism.
You are here making an ill-fitting analogy. A barn is both a physical product and a physical space to exist in, whereas breaking bad is a recorded performance. To follow your barn analogy though: You should be paid because this barn only works as long as you are inside it. It relies on you being in it, and you signed a contract that said you'd be paid for people seeing the barn on the person's ground with you inside it. You assumed the person wouldn't move the barn to another person's ground, but they did and now it still relies on you being in it, but you get nothing. At this point you should really be asking why AMC gets paid for having the barn.
Now you're the one making ill-fitting analogies. Aaron Paul doesn't have to do any addition labour each time someone watches Breaking Bad. He's not required to be in the barn, it's just got an image of him painted on one wall.
To over-extend the analogy further; if I build a barn and the farmer agrees to pay me $X for each cow living it, what should happen if he starts storing wheat in it instead? I signed a bad contract, but it's still the terms I agreed to. I'm not automatically entitled to go back and change them.
Yeah, good. Ok.
If you're not interested in engaging with the arguments presented to you by me and other users, then there's no reason to engage in a discussion.
They aren’t changing an active contract, they are negotiating a new one. Your entire argument is “hey you already signed a contract”. No they didn’t. They have something called a union that allows them to negotiate their contracts. No one is breaking their word. They are looking to change a system that favors studio executives, what is hard to understand here for you?
I’m fact, they’ve gone to great lengths to encourage members to fulfill the commitments of existing contracts during the strike. Saying they want people to break contracts or act outside of their bounds is similar to saying that everyone should boycott the movie studios until the strike is over. Nope. The union has not requested that and doing it is counterproductive. Supporting a strike is not a decentralized consumer choice like Xitter encourages. It actually has organization to it.
Because Netflix is making a ton of money off of something that they didn't do the work of making.
For a different angle than what other people are saying, I'd argue that it's just because of the particular way the commodification of the arts works under the current system: companies that did nothing but purchase a commodified license that then allows them to commodify the work themselves shouldn't be making money off that deal, in fact that entire deal should be impossible, but because that is the status quo it means that rightfully that wealth that's being generated belongs to the workers who created the commodity in the first place.
That should not be the status quo, obviously. Under a better system this wouldn't even be a question: movies would not be commodities generating revenue, at least not domestically, and would instead be produced with public funding through any number of possible systems; actors and other workers would be compensated for their labor, and potentially entitled to further rewards depending on the reception the work gets, but in a more even and equitable fashion than the current paradigm of a select few people making fortunes (and still being undercompensated because of how valuable movies are as a commodity) while everyone else involved gets worked to the bone for much, much less; any profits turned through international distribution would then go to further subsidize the arts instead of disappearing into some executive's bank account as profits do now.