Take a minute and read this, if you would, for the sake of unemployed and hungry writers: a good write-up about what's actually at stake for the writers in the guild strike.
What I found most shocking in this was that the number the AMPTP has been putting around (trying to make this group out to be fat-cat greedy types) about writer's average yearly income being $200,000 dollars? is figured only from whoever in the guild happened to be employed at the time, ignoring the vast majority of the writers who are most of the time NOT able to find paid work, and are barely squeaking by on what residuals they've got, but including the few outlying multi-millionaires. Imagine how different that number would look if everyone in the guild was counted for the averaging of income of guild members--that is, if there was a useful, accurate number here at all. That number would be tempered by the vast field of $0 income-at-any-given-times, and it would plummet.
This is intellectual property, people. This is about getting to see at least a little more return from their creative work, when studios and producers are exploiting them to the fullest and getting paid for what the writers have done over and over. If you wrote something, and weren't even allowed to keep a copyright, and someone else was making buckets of money off of it while you were at it, wouldn't you want to see more than a half a percent of that?
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