writers – Techdirt (original) (raw)

What Will Be The Impact Of The AI & Streaming Data Language In The New WGA Contract?

from the consequences dept

As you’ve likely heard, earlier this week the WGA worked out a tentative agreement with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) on a new contract that ended their months-long strike. By all accounts, this looks like a big win for the WGA, which is fantastic and long overdue.

The AMPTP seemed to recognize it had no leg to stand on and seemed to hope that its best strategy was to “wait out” the writers. That doesn’t appear to have worked very well. The new pay rates and guarantees seem like a big win for writers. The WGA negotiating team appears to have done a fantastic job on those fundamental negotiating points, and it’s a clear (well deserved) win for the writers.

Throughout the strike there was a lot of attention paid to the AI demands (perhaps even more attention was paid to that than the underlying economic questions), and I’m not quite sure how I feel about where things came down on that front.

As some have pointed out, in the end, the AI agreement can be read as a near complete capitulation to the writers, as it says that the producers can’t use AI to write a basic script and then hand it off to a human writer at a lower payscale to clean up. However, it does (and this is a really good thing) allow the writers themselves to figure out how to make use of AI for themselves as a productivity tool, which… makes sense. Empower the writers to figure out if it’s a useful tool, rather than thinking that the AI is going to produce anything worthwhile on its own.

One interpretation of all of this is that somewhere in the ~150 day strike, the producers had enough time to play around with AI and realize that it just isn’t able to replace writers like they appeared to hope it would do originally. As we pointed out here, though, AI can be a super useful tool in the writers hands to avoid having to deal with the drudgery part of the job, allowing them to spend more time on the actual creative act of writing. And so the framing of the agreement, at least, where it’s about empowering the writers to use the tools where necessary seems good.

But there was something that bugged me about the language of it, which writer/director/actor (and Techdirt podcast guest) Alex Winter points out in a new Wired piece: while the agreement is framed in a way that seems beneficial to the writers, it requires them to really trust the studios, as there appear to be lots of ways that they might get around what’s in the agreement. And the producers aren’t necessarily the most trustworthy folks out there. As Alex notes, the studios had been experimenting with AI prior to this and he’s not sure if they’ll just drop those initiatives. It might just be that they won’t tell writers what the AI did.

It’s hard to imagine that the studios will tell artists the truth when being asked to dismantle their AI initiatives, and attribution is all but impossible to prove with machine-learning outputs.

The other tidbit that a lot of people are celebrating is the agreement that streaming platforms will now share specific data on “the total number of hours streamed,” which has mostly been a secret. This was another big demand of the writers, mainly as part of their effort to get some sort of residuals setup going for streaming.

But, as a very interesting episode of the Search Engine podcast recently discussed, in the early days of streaming, the fact that streaming platforms didn’t share viewer data was seen as a benefit to many writers/actors/directors. It meant that they weren’t competing over numbers all the time, and weren’t focused on making something that would appeal to the widest possible audience.

That meant that a much wider variety of content was greenlit for some of those platforms, as they (especially Netflix, but also Amazon) wanted to have a really diverse set of creative shows and movies to entice people to pay the monthly subscription fee to see whatever they wanted. In that scenario, the specific numbers for any particular movie or show don’t matter as much, so long as there was enough diverse content available on the platform that it made users feel comfortable coughing up their monthly subscription fee. Indeed, that actually created incentives for more niche, quirky, diverse, wacky, experimental content, with no one ever needing to be concerned with “how is it performing?”

So, there is some reasonable fear that now that they will have to share the viewer data (privately to the WGA, not publicly), that could change. The incentive structure gets messed up a bit. There will be more incentives to create mass market content, and less ability to just create cool, different content that might appeal to a niche audience enough to get people to sign up for the monthly payment.

Now, a (reasonable!) retort to that is that the “we need all this diverse content!” made sense in the early landgrab days, but perhaps makes a lot less sense with the streaming market reaching some sort of saturation level where users are beginning to bail, and Wall St. is demanding more profits and less investment out of these platforms. If we’re already seeing streaming platforms pulling shows off the platforms for the tax breaks, perhaps this move away from supporting the weird and the wacky and the diverse was already going away no matter what.

Overall, though, it’s nice to see the writers get a strong contract that improves the underlying economics in ways that are important to their ability to make a living writing. I’m less sure that the AI language will be that impactful, though, and I’m curious to see how the incentives on the streaming side play out.

The one other bit I’m curious about: I’m kind of wondering if this experience will cause writers/actors/directors to increasingly look to route around the producers. Yes, for big productions they’re still necessary, but as tools for high quality moviemaking become increasingly cheaper and more widely accessible, I’m wondering if we’ll see a rise in more high quality self-produced works (or community produced works) that are then streamed not through the big subscription services, but elsewhere (YouTube, obviously, but it wouldn’t surprise me to see services like a “Substack-for-video” kind of thing pop up at some point).

After all, the producers can’t screw over the actual creative folks… if they’re not involved any more.

Filed Under: ai, data, incentives, movies, production, streaming, writers, writers strike
Companies: amptp, wga

We’ve talked a lot about questions regarding AI and copyright over the last few years, highlighting repeatedly that AI-created works cannot be covered by copyrights. No matter how many times we’ve pointed this out, some are still trying, and it was nice to see yet another court (not the first) again say that AI-created works get no copyright at all just recently.

There’s also an issue regarding AI and the ongoing writers’ and actors’ strike against Hollywood studios. Some of the strikers are wondering if copyright can help protect them, and I’ve explained to them that it’s very much the wrong tool.

But, in a weird way, the lack of copyright on AI-created materials actually creates a surprising kind of leverage point for the creative folks who are striking. The Hollywood Reporter recently had an oddly framed article about the AI part of the dispute, highlighting the fact that copyright law doesn’t cover AI-created works, and suggesting that will impact the studios’ “offer to writers.”

But missing from the proposal, which was described as meeting the “priority concerns” of the guild, is how the studios need writers to exploit any work created by AI under existing copyright laws. That’s because works solely created by AI are not copyrightable. To be granted protection, a human would need to rewrite any AI-produced script.

“Fundamentally, the offers mistook who’s doing who a favor,” John Lopez, a member of the WGA’s working group on AI, tells The Hollywood Reporter. “They need us.”

By keeping AI on the table, the studios may be looking to capitalize on the intellectual property rights around works created by the tools. “If a human touches material created by generative AI, then the typical copyright protections will kick in,” a source close to the AMPTP says.

This is… confusing, and only partly accurate. But it makes for an interesting discussion for the writers and actors worried about AI. They can actually leverage the lack of copyright on AI-created works to their advantage in these negotiations.

The article is correct that AI-created works don’t get copyright protection, but if there’s a human (or multiple humans) in the process, the creative elements added by those humans could get some level of copyright protection, though it would generally be seen as “thin” copyright, such as that given to nature photographs, in which the human creativity is only a small part of what makes the photo work, and the copyright protection is limited to just those human created elements.

Thus, it seems to me that the striking writers and and actors can use the studios’ (overly aggressive and often ridiculous) infatuation with copyright law to their own advantage, by highlighting that without their direct human involvement, the studios will risk releasing TV and movies that have very weak copyright built in.

If the studios want to retain strong copyright protection (and because it’s been driven into their heads that they need this badly)… then, they need to involve the actual writers and actors, and not just use the AI.

In a weird way, the lack of copyright protection for AI-created works actually helps the striking writers and actors, because it’s their human creativity that can imbue a work with copyright protection (even if that copyright is then assigned to the studio itself). I find this… pretty amusing and I hope that actors and writers leverage the studios’ obsession with copyright to their own advantage here. Hollywood’s obsession with copyright and the false belief that it must protect everything actually harms its position here… and that just seems like the kind of thing that the Hollywood studios deserve.

Filed Under: actors, ai, copyright, hollywood, strike, thin copyright, writer's strike, writers
Companies: amptp

Hugely Profitable And Consolidated Streaming Platforms Suddenly Too Cheap To Pay Residuals And Writers, Or Keep Niche Shows Online

from the dysfunction-junction dept

Fri, May 26th 2023 05:28am - Karl Bode

We’ve noted repeatedly that as the streaming sector grows and consolidates, it’s revealing many of the same problems we saw inherent in traditional, shitty, cable TV. As in the need to provide Wall Street improved quarterly returns at any cost has them doing the sort of things common in the traditional cable sector they used to criticize and disrupt (see Netflix’s password sharing cash grab).

Elsewhere, we’re seeing the byproduct of mindless consolidation results in other problems. Such as with the AT&T/Time Warner/Discovery mess, a series of utterly pointless mergers that have made the end product decidedly worse, while resulting in thousands of layoffs, price hikes, companies too cheap to pay artist residuals, writer strikes, and widespread annoyance and angst.

Warner Brother Discovery has been too cheap to pay artist residuals, resulting in a lot of popular shows being pulled from the company’s HBO Max streaming platform. We’re seeing the same thing over at Disney+, which apparently has proven unable to keep shows they’ve just recently produced — like Willow — online and available to a handful of customers via streaming.

The reason we’re given is that the same giant media conglomerates that spent hundreds of billions of dollars on pointless megamerger sprees, and received tens of billions of dollars in tax breaks for doing absolutely nothing, suddenly can’t afford to pay their writers a living wage, or keep shows like Willow available to consumers:

Streamers like Disney+ have to pay rights-holders and content creators continually in many cases to keep their content on their platforms, but often that content is being viewed by too few people and isn’t driving new subscriptions. As such, these businesses see cuts as obvious ways to save money during turbulent times.

The cuts are occurring at the same time that corporations are once again flexing their muscles in the wake of a brief shift of power toward labor during peak COVID. As the narrative goes, this kind of belt tightening is only wise given the “turbulent times” and a purported recession (?) waiting in the wings. You’re lucky to have a job. Sit down and shut up.

In reality, chipping away at your own streaming catalog is one of several ruthless determinations made by bean counters who are no strangers to wasting hundreds of billions of dollars on failed luxury amusement parks and massive megamergers, but somehow now can’t afford to maintain user access to a relative handful of niche programming:

So who decides which shows should get the boot? Bean counters, mostly, who consider the cost of carrying library content based on how much is paid toward residuals, participations and royalties. That is weighed against viewership and a title’s ability to lure more subscribers — like The Office on Peacock, for example — and create less churn. Ahead of Showtime dumping titles, Chris McCarthy, President/CEO, Showtime and Paramount Media, said that “we will divert investment away from areas that are underperforming and that account for less than 10% of our views.”

But again, it’s not just less popular shows like Willow getting the axe. Sesame Street and other popular kids’ programming have been shown the door. Mad Magazine was an early casualty of merger mania. There’s logic-driven belt tightening, and then there’s just being fucking cheap.

Routinely lost in the conversation is all the endless promises of “untold synergies” that accompanied decades of mindless media consolidation. Synergies that were supposed to have made these companies lean and resilient long ago. In reality, that consolidation instead created a massive, wasteful mess fraught with consistent managerial incompetence that’s increasingly catching up to the industry:

On Tuesday morning, subscribers took to social media to complain that they were having problems logging in to Max, which is replacing the three-year-old HBO Max service. As reported by users, the issues spanned the Max.com website as well as mobile apps including iOS and connected-TV apps on Roku and Samsung TV.

It’s growth for growth’s sake. Change for change’s sake. And dealmaking for dealmaking’s sake. Usually simply to generate tax write offs and let incompetent media executives fail upwards while pretending they’re savvy dealmakers.

You’ll notice that how much money gets wasted in mindless consolidation, pointless megadeals, and sustained managerial incompetence kind of gets lost in the weeds when it comes time to explain why streaming catalogs are shrinking, prices are rising, writers can’t get paid, and layoffs abound. But harmful and often pointless consolidation remains a primary reason streaming is slowly turning into the terrible cable TV sector it used to make fun of.

Filed Under: cable tv, mergers, streaming, streaming tv, video, wall st., willow, writers
Companies: warner bros. discovery

An Actual D&D Effect: Inspiring Kids To Become Writers

from the let-me-tell-you-a-story dept

It’s funny, but despite the stories we occasionally write involving the classic roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons, some of which I’ve written myself, I’ve never actually played the game. Maybe that’s why, according to the folks who have tried to ban the game, I’m not a satanic axe-wielding, uber-murderer. Who knows; could be possible. And, truth be told, outside of the more broadly-accepted video game habit I have, I’ve never delved into much of the so-called nerd gaming culture, other than being completely addicted to Wil Wheaton’s Table Top YouTube series. And, despite all of the historical controversy over these kinds of games, I really wish I’d gotten into them more now that some literary authors are claiming what a huge influence _D&D_-style games have had on their abilities as story-tellers.

For certain writers, especially those raised in the 1970s and ’80s, all that time spent in basements has paid off. D&D helped jump-start their creative lives. As [writer Junot] Díaz said, “It’s been a formative narrative media for all sorts of writers.”

The league of ex-gamer writers also includes the “weird fiction” author China Miéville (“The City & the City”); Brent Hartinger (author of “Geography Club,” a novel about gay and bisexual teenagers); the sci-fi and young adult author Cory Doctorow; the poet and fiction writer Sherman Alexie; the comedian Stephen Colbert; George R. R. Martin, author of the “A Song of Ice and Fire” series (who still enjoys role-playing games). Others who have been influenced are television and film storytellers and entertainers like Robin Williams, Matt Groening (“The Simpsons”), Dan Harmon (“Community”) and Chris Weitz (“American Pie”).

It’s an impressive list, but it also makes a certain kind of sense. There’s a certain sandbox-esque element to creating a low-tech story-based gaming environment centered around roleplaying with friends. As someone who has written fiction, I can tell you that one of the most important aspects of telling a story is being able to get inside the heads of the characters in your tale. That’s essentially roleplaying, no matter how you look at it. The other half of the story equation is the setting, which is something roleplaying players also must engage in creatively.

The Dungeon Master must create a believable world with a back story, adventures the players might encounter and options for plot twists. That requires skills as varied as a theater director, researcher and psychologist — all traits integral to writing. (Mr. Díaz said his boyhood gaming group was “more like an improv group with some dice.”)

Sharyn McCrumb, 66, who writes the Ballad Novels series set in Appalachia, was similarly influenced, and in her comic novel “Bimbos of the Death Sun” D&D even helps solve a murder.

“I always, always wanted to be the Dungeon Master because that’s where the creativity lies — in thinking up places, characters and situations,” Ms. McCrumb said. “If done well, a game can be a novel in itself.”

Now, some of this might read like an advertisement for pen-and-paper or tabletop games as a creativity booster such that the modern-day video games can’t match, but that’s almost certainly a mistake. You can make that argument against some of the mindless games out there, but you could do likewise with poorly constructed D&D games as set up by the people playing them. As games become more story-driven, as they are able to portray plot and characters with more granularity than ever before, and as player choice becomes interwoven into the story, the player is creating their own story to some degree, just like they do in a classic roleplaying game.

The larger lesson, of course, is that all the moral panics we hear tend to focus on an overblown fear and ignore any net-positive that might exist. Generations of speculative fiction authors and other creative folks were influenced positively by Dungeons & Dragons, despite the fervor by some against the games themselves. I’d lay money down that we’ll hear similar stories about modern-day gaming as well.

Filed Under: dungeons and dragons, inspiration, moral panics, writers

from the not-mine dept

One of the concerns we have about the US Copyright Office is that the staff there often seem entirely out of touch with the world we live in today. Witness, for example, its description of the Authors Guild in a recent announcement about an event they’re hosting celebrating the Authors Guild 100th anniversary:

The Copyright Office is pleased to host a Copyright Matters discussion about the history and future of the professional author on December 11 at 3 p.m. in the Coolidge Auditorium of the Library of Congress. The event, occurring on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of The Authors Guild, the nation’s leading advocate for writers’ interests, will feature Guild president, author Scott Turow, as the keynote speaker. Other speakers include author and past Guild president Robert K. Massie; John Y. Cole of the Library’s Center for the Book; and book market analyst Peter Hildick-Smith of the Codex Group. Also present will be guest authors Roy Blount, Jr., Katherine Neville, Mary Pope Osbourne, Nick Taylor, and others. The event is free and open to the public. See www.copyright.gov/copyrightmatters.html.

Except, of course, that’s not even close to true. The Authors Guild represents a very tiny sliver of “writers.” It currently has about 9,000 members, and famously only realized that self-published authors count as authors… a few months ago. Look, if copyright only covered works that were officially registered with the Copyright Office, perhaps they’d have a point in claiming that the AG represents writers. But that’s silly. Due to ridiculous expansion of copyright laws in the US and around the globe (much of which the Copyright Office gleefully supported), everything that people write that has even a tiny modicum of new/creative elements is automatically covered by copyright. That includes the email you just sent and the scribble your toddler just drew on a piece of paper.

Somehow, I don’t see the Authors Guild watching out for those “writers” interests.

What about me? I make my living writing — but I see the Authors Guild as an out of touch organization run by luddites working hard to limit and hinder innovation because they’re confused and scared of technology — mainly how it creates more competition for their special club which doesn’t want too many members. This is the same organization that argued that having a legally purchased ebooks read aloud violated their copyrights. The same organization that has sued libraries for scanning books to make them available for people to read in digital form. The same Authors Guild who has argued that the future of books is… brick and mortar stores. The same Authors Guild who (seriously) argued that Shakespeare wouldn’t survive in the modern era since no one respects copyright any more (ignoring that there was no copyright in Shakespeare’s time, and he did okay).

The Authors Guild isn’t representing 99.999% of all “writers.” And it certainly doesn’t seem to be advocating for writers’ interests, considering that it’s fought against some of the best new technologies for creating, distributing, promoting and monetizing writers’ works today.

Of course, we know what this is really about. The Copyright Office is still living in a time in the past, where it gets to fetishize a small cadre and closed off “club” of top professionals, ignoring that the rules and laws they seek to pass to protect that club against innovation and competition, also have massive negative impacts on the vast majority of content creators who aren’t members of that tiny club. The Authors Guild may do wonderful things for a small group of authors who don’t want to change with the times, but I don’t see how that’s a particularly beneficial service. It seems like a mistake. And the Copyright Office celebrates this?

Filed Under: authors, copyright, copyright office, writers
Companies: authors guild

For Small Authors, eBooks Are Much Better Than Being Printed On Pulp

from the new-models dept

Hephaestus writes “_This is a different perspective on the e-books as the killer of the book publishing industry. It’s a take from the small author perspective._”

As the eBook experience improves, especially with the increased adoption of the Kindle and iPad, authors now have the same opportunity that exists now for musicians to exploit new opportunities. Like the music world, most writers also don’t expect to make a great living from writing, so for them, exposure to readers is more valuable than revenue:

If you give a writer a choice between $10,000 and 10,000 readers, the writer will always choose the latter.

After all, having 10,000 readers is a fantastic connection with which to work — at that point, all an author would have to do to make money would be to give the readers a reason to buy. For writers, there’s already a fantastic finite good that they can sell, the printed book. While this may seem counter-intuitive, we’ve seen this model work before: after a publisher gave away digital copies of a book for free, they saw their physical book sales increase 20x. So, like the musicians who embrace the opportunities that the new economy offers, writers have a similar entrepreneurial opportunity.

Filed Under: books, ebooks, writers

Using Creative Fiction To Increase Value Of Trinkets On eBay

from the using-infinite-goods... dept

When we talk about understanding how to embrace the economics of infinite goods, one of the key points I’ve tried to make is that every product is a bundle of scarce and infinite goods. That’s a point that some people have a lot of trouble with at times, insisting that some people who create infinite goods have no scarcities to sell… and, conversely, that those who make scarce goods, sometimes have no infinite goods to give away with them. While it may be a bit more complicated to separate out the scarce and infinite goods, it doesn’t mean they don’t exist.

Parker writes in to point out a fascinating example. Apparently a group of fiction writers are experimenting with selling physical goods on eBay with fictional stories given away “free” in the description. The project is called Significant Objects, and involves a bunch of fiction writers purchasing random trinkets, and then coming up with a neat story to go with them. The post at io9 notes that some stories seem better than others at increasing the auction bids, but points out that: “If Rosenfeld’s success is any indication, these authors may actually get paid more for short fiction on eBay than they would at most publications.”

Again, some will incorrectly claim that we’re saying that fiction writers should start selling crap on eBay, but that’s not it at all. This is just one (fun) example of many of content creators smartly using infinite goods (the stories) to make a scarce good (the trinket) more valuable, and putting in place a business model to profit from it. Once again, we learn that creativity knows no bounds, not just in creating content, but in playing around with new business models.

Filed Under: auctions, business models, fiction, infinite goods, scarce goods, significant objects, trinkets, writers
Companies: ebay

Writers' Guild Claims Studios Ignoring Earlier Settlement As Actors Get Ready To Strike

from the this-won't-end-well dept

While I have no doubt that the movie studios are being sleazy and underhanded in how it deals with both writers and actors concerning various contracts, it still seemed like both movie and TV writers were making a big mistake in demanding residuals for internet usage. All that does is make it more difficult to get that content online. And, of course, it meant that actors were going to fight for the same thing.

Now, just as the studios and actors had their negotiations breakdown, the Writers’ Guild is claiming that producers are not living up to their end of the deal struck earlier this year. The writers claim that they’re not getting the promised residuals, and the producers seem to be disputing which content is covered by the agreement. The writers say that all modern content from the past few decades is covered, while producers say the agreement only covers content made after February 13th of this year — the date of the settlement.

To be honest, the whole dispute is rather silly. Any such system of royalties is going to break down. It may have worked in the past, but it’s based on that same old concept of artificial scarcity that makes it more difficult to adapt to the modern economic reality of digital content. By insisting that the studios have to pay residuals on content reused on the internet (effectively getting writers and actors paid multiple times for the same work), it just solidifies the barriers for the folks who employ those writers and actors to adapt to the modern economic and technological reality. The writers and actors are just harming themselves by making it harder for studios to move into the internet era, adding tremendous additional costs beyond what was already paid for.

Filed Under: actors, hollywood, residuals, sag, strike, wga, writers

Hollywood Writers Eye Startup Life

from the risky-business dept

The LA Times reports on ongoing negotiations between writers and venture capitalists to create Hollywood startups. Apparently "dozens" of Hollywood writers are looking to launch companies that would allow them to produce video content that would be distributed directly to fans on the web. We've noted that there are already a number of companies pursuing this strategy, and with thousands of talented writers sitting idle, this is an ideal time to start more of them. In the long run, these kinds of startups will ensure writers get compensated fairly because it will give writers who feel they're under-compensated an exit option. On the other hand, the LA Times makes clear that writers jumping into alternative business models may find that the reality of Hollywood startups to be a culture shock. A lot of successful online content outfits tend to be shoestring operations, and it's likely to take a few more years before the bulk of viewers make the switch to Internet-based sources of information. Writers used to the relatively large budgets and large audiences of Hollywood studios may find it difficult to adjust to being at a web startup that no one has (yet) heard of. This may explain why in a town with ten thousand writers, only "dozens" are looking at the startup option. On the other hand, those writers with an appetite for risk or a thirst for creative control may thrive in an environment where they call the shots and reap a much larger share of the rewards if they succeed.

Filed Under: hollywood, startups, writer's strike, writers

Staples Sued By Canadian Writers And Publishers For Photocopying Books

from the had-to-happen-at-some-point dept

Michael Geist points us to the news that Access Copyright, an organization representing approximately 9,000 Canadian publishers and writers has sued Staples/Business Depot for copyright infringement over photocopying done at the stores in Canada. They’re asking for $10 million, which Geist notes is “the largest lawsuit ever launched over copyright infringement of published works in Canada.” For photocopying books in stores? Are book publishers really worried about the photocopier menace? Hopefully there’s more to this claim than just the fact that people can photocopy passages from a book at Staples. It’s pretty difficult to believe that this practice is widespread enough to cause any serious harm to publishers or writers. If it’s just about people copying an occasional passage, as Geist notes, a previous lawsuit against libraries had found that the libraries weren’t responsible and that “fair dealing” (similar to fair use in the states) shouldn’t be constrained. Sure, if Staples were somehow copying books and selling the photocopies out the back you could make an argument that it’s an issue, but if people are just using the photocopier in the store to copy parts of a book for personal reasons, it’s hard to see the rationale here.

Filed Under: canada, photocopying, publishers, writers
Companies: access copyright, staples