sfwa – Techdirt (original) (raw)

Disney Is Still Trying To Avoid Paying Its Writers

from the hollywood-accounting dept

There are all sorts of silly and made up reasons to be mad at Disney, but those shouldn’t take away from the many legitimate ways in which Disney is a terrible, awful company. For years, it was one of the most aggressive in pushing for ever expanded copyrights, and was one of the chief lobbyists pushing to extend copyright in all sorts of directions. To be honest, over the last two decades, some of the other big Hollywood/media companies have gotten even more aggressive than Disney, but Disney has certainly remained aggressively awful.

And, of course, any time someone pushes back on this aspect of Disney colonizing culture, they pull out the copyright landlord’s favorite justification: “we’re doing it for the artists.” Over and over again, we see the big TV and movie studios, the giant record labels, and the biggest publishers claiming they need to fight for ever expanded copyrights to help the actual creators — all while doing absolutely everything they possibly can to avoid paying anyone anything at all.

Even for those of us deeply aware of the nature of “Hollywood Accounting,” the story that came out late in 2020 was still stunning. The Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) kicked off a campaign on behalf of famed author Alan Dean Foster — who wrote many of the early Star Wars books. Disney had claimed that when it bought the Hollywood studio 20th Century Fox, that it only bought the assets and none of the liabilities, and therefore, Disney’s lawyers claimed, it could keep on publishing the books Foster wrote without paying any royalties.

Now, that’s quite a trick. Indeed, if you could do that, well, then it would seem to create quite a lucrative business opportunity. Sign up a bunch of creatives to publishing deals. Hell, promise them extremely high royalty rates (you’re not going to end up paying them, so who cares?), and then after the contracts are in, sell off the “assets” but not the “liabilities” of your business to a different entity, allowing them to keep publishing and you never actually have to pay any royalties. Genius! Pure evil. But, genius.

But it seems especially rich that Disney, which has spent so many decades insisting its out there fighting the good fight to support “creative artists” to be doing this. Recently, the SFWA published an update on the campaign, noting that while Disney did agree to pay some high profile authors, it is still refusing to do it for less well known authors:

You’ve paid some authors what you owed them. But there are other creators that you don’t want to talk about. And, because you did not take our advice, new creators are coming forward who are owed money, too.

You still refuse to recognize your obligations to lesser-known authors who wrote media tie-in works for Marvel, for Star Wars, for Aliens, for Predator, for Buffy: TVS, and more, universes that you’ve bought the rights to, along with the obligations to those creators. You’ve re-published their works but have failed to do even the bare necessities of contract and talent management. You’ve failed to pay these writers royalties they’re legally owed and have not given them the courtesy of royalty statements and reprint notices.

Cory Doctorow has written up an interesting post on this as well, noting how it lays bare Disney’s blatant hypocrisy:

This is shameful, and it points to the hollowness of Disney’s long-running holy war to get us all to “respect copyright.” Disney respects copyright only to the extent that it serves as a charter for corporate abuse of creators, or a means by which Disney can reach beyond its corporate walls and dictate the conduct of its competitors or other industries. When it comes to copyright as a tool for securing the rightful wages of creative workers, Disney exhibits contempt far beyond the taunts of The Pirate Bay or the insouciance of bootleg DVD hawkers in a night market.

Copyright’s power to create worker power has always been oversold, mostly by giant entertainment companies who correctly understood that the more copyright creators got, the more copyright they could expropriate through non-negotiable contracts. Copyright isn’t useless to creators, but it is also no substitute for fair contracting laws, labor organizing, and antitrust enforcement.

His article also looks at a few others ways that Disney is trying to use copyright to abuse, rather than help artists.

Of course, I was curious what organizations, that pretend to “represent the creators,” had to say about all of this, so I went to the website of CreativeFuture. Their website insists that they’re there to help “creative people.” They even have this amazingly ridiculous banner (that they apparently registered a trademark over, because why not?)

So, here’s a story where the industry is literally refusing to pay creative people what they’re contractually owed, for their creations. Surely, CreativeFuture has spoken up about this attack on the livelihoods of creators, right? I mean, the organization even set up a whole hashtag campaign, #StandCreative, to pretend it is “standing with” creators. So, surely, they’ve come out in support of Alan Dean Foster and the SFWA and all of the creators Disney is not paying, right? Right?!?

Huh. Guess not.

Instead, the top article on their website… is attacking EFF, the organization Cory Doctorow works for. Doctorow is out there advocating for artists to actually get paid, while CreativeFuture is attacking his work and pretending it actually supports creatives.

I wonder why CreativeFuture isn’t supporting these creative people? Hmm. I mean, I’m sure that CreativeFuture’s board of directors would be right there at the front of the line demanding that Disney pay the writers it owes, right? I mean, look, let’s just grab a randomly selected CreativeFuture board member and see…

So who is that? Oh, just the senior executive vice president, secretary and general counsel to the… oh…. The Walt Disney Company. Ah, well. That explains it.

Well, I’m sure some of CreativeFuture’s other board members would note his conflict of interest and stand up for the actual creators, right? Hmm. There’s Leah Weil, the General Counsel of Sony Pictures, so that’s not going to work. Oh, and the General Counsel of Warner Bros., John Rogovin, (well until just recently). Well, I’m sure this other person, Kimberly Harris will stand up for… oh, oh I see. General Counsel for NBCUniversal, you say?

Yes, yes, I’m beginning to see why CreativeFuture apparently wants nothing to do with this actual campaign to support actual creators. It might interfere with the interests of the Hollywood studios that set up CreativeFuture as a pure front group in the first place.

Filed Under: alan dean foster, copyright, pay the writer, paying creatives, supporting creators
Companies: creativefuture, disney, sfwa

Disney (Disney!) Accused Of Trying To Lawyer Its Way Out Of Paying Royalties To Alan Dean Foster

from the the-maximalism-only-works-in-one-direction dept

Disney, of course, has quite the reputation as a copyright maximalist. It has been accused of being the leading company in always pushing for more draconian copyright laws. And then, of course, there’s the infamous Mickey Mouse curve, first designated a decade ago by Tom Bell, highlighting how copyright term extensions seemed to always happen just as Mickey Mouse was set to go into the public domain (though, hopefully that’s about to end):

Whether accurate or not, Disney is synonymous with maximizing copyright law, which the company and its lobbyists always justify with bullshit claims of how they do it “for the artist.”

Except that it appears that Disney is not paying artists. While the details are a bit fuzzy, yesterday the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) and famed author Alan Dean Foster announced that Disney was no longer paying him royalties for the various Star Wars books he wrote (including the novelization of the very first film back in 1976), along with his novelizations of the Aliens movies. He claims he’d always received royalties before, but they suddenly disappeared.

Foster wrote a letter (amusingly addressed to “Mickey”) in which he lays out his side of the argument, more or less saying that as Disney has gobbled up various other companies and rights, it just stopped paying royalties:

When you purchased Lucasfilm you acquired the rights to some books I wrote. STAR WARS, the novelization of the very first film. SPLINTER OF THE MIND?S EYE, the first sequel novel. You owe me royalties on these books. You stopped paying them.

When you purchased 20th Century Fox, you eventually acquired the rights to other books I had written. The novelizations of ALIEN, ALIENS, and ALIEN 3. You?ve never paid royalties on any of these, or even issued royalty statements for them.

All these books are all still very much in print. They still earn money. For you. When one company buys another, they acquire its liabilities as well as its assets. You?re certainly reaping the benefits of the assets. I?d very much like my miniscule (though it?s not small to me) share.

You want me to sign an NDA (Non-disclosure agreement) before even talking. I?ve signed a lot of NDAs in my 50-year career. Never once did anyone ever ask me to sign one prior to negotiations. For the obvious reason that once you sign, you can no longer talk about the matter at hand. Every one of my representatives in this matter, with many, many decades of experience in such business, echo my bewilderment.

You continue to ignore requests from my agents. You continue to ignore queries from SFWA, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. You continue to ignore my legal representatives. I know this is what gargantuan corporations often do. Ignore requests and inquiries hoping the petitioner will simply go away. Or possibly die. But I?m still here, and I am still entitled to what you owe me. Including not to be ignored, just because I?m only one lone writer. How many other writers and artists out there are you similarly ignoring?

In a video press conference, Foster and SFWA (while admitting that no one on the call were lawyers) said that Disney is claiming that it purchased “the rights but not the obligations” to these works. That’s… weird. And I wish there was a lawyer on the call. Because that doesn’t make much sense.

As SFWA notes, if it is possible to purchase rights without the obligations, then any company could just do a sham sale of the rights without the obligations and get out of paying any royalties ever.

Of course, the details here matter, and we only have one side (and not their lawyers). There may be something very weird in these contracts (and this is, basically, a contract dispute, not a copyright one). But just at a fundamental facts of the situation look disgusting on Disney’s part. If you owe royalties, you pay the royalties. Considering how aggressive Disney is with its own copyrights, you’d think its lawyers would understand that.

Filed Under: alan dean foster, aliens, contracts, copyright, mickey mouse, obligations, rights, royalties, star wars
Companies: disney, sfwa