Don't be Afraid of Dinosaurs! AKA Let the WGA have their way!

So the big news I guess going around the circles I choose to pay attention to is the Writer's Guild of America's strike against the studios. The forecast is all doom and gloom (No more Heroes! Whatever, I stopped watching that show last season, I'm way too good for it now.).

But really, the effects can already be seen. The Daily Show and The Colbert Report have both stopped airing new episodes, as well as Late night television such as Conan O'Brian. This I will say for most of my demograph, is truly devastating. Here's a quick summary of the issues:




Basically writer's want to be paid for the work they do. Hard to disagree with that. Of course I don't know the studio's side of it, but my preconceived leanings tell me that they are just trying to squeeze and pinch every dollar they can out of their products, because they're a, you know, business. But then again, this is why unions exist. So I lend my full ideological support to the WGA and its members, which means beyond blogging about it I'll probably tell some people at a party that I support the WGA whilst reciting the above video to make me look cool and maybe get laid.

But the part that really interest me about this whole thing is the very thing which the debate centers around, the prominence of online media. The writers are sensing a shift in the distribution of content much like writers did when the television was new and are trying to align themselves in a position of not getting screwed over again. But at the same time its not just the medium that is changing, its the very nature of ownership that is changing.

While I support the writers (have I said that enough to be cool?), I think what they are doing is just bracing for a fall. They represent big media, with lots of money and production value put into their content. But if you saw Transformers, or any other Michael Bay/Jerry Bruckheimer/whomever movie you know that money plus a talent for making things look pretty, is not equal to good content.

YouTube and other such sites have told us that you can make something entertaining to watch (and something that can generate revenue) with hardly any money and it doesn't have to look pretty, sans unions and sans studios.

Creative Commons licensing has also shook up the idea of what can be done with media. Now under a CCL someone can share another's work and post it online with the same CCL and there wouldn't be any way of paying the creator for that. So in a CC environment a writer would get paid for the original incarnation of the work and any subsequent varieties produced by the source of the work and that would be all. But if that work is downloaded and spread virally, mashed up with other videos or simply shown to a large group of people (subject to the CCL terms of course) then the writer won't be making any money off it. There would be no one to regulate that, and that doesn't even matter. Content is generating revenue without regulation or restriction. The natural flow of ideas is supporting that very same stream of creativity. Seems like it would make sense right?

And you can tell that the WGA members a bursting at the seems with creativity and suffering under the lack of a medium to express it in currently by the small crop of independent videos they are making.

"Not the Daily Show"
From the writers of the Daily Show



Videologblog from the writers of the Colbert Report



I think there will always be a place for big media content, after all we all like to see well produced shows that have the money to attract talented writers/actors/directors/producers/the whole lot to create some of the best content out there. But if the studios won't pay the writers someone will! And the Internet is the haps baby that's not going to change save apocalyptic meltdown of society. And there's money to be made, as the above Daily Show video shows. In reality the studios need to be begging the writers to come back with open arms full of cash money. They are brining themselves closer to death with this old world attempt to control.

I often think of the quote from Jurassic Park by Malcolm where he says something about life finding a way and then he's right and the dinosaurs switch sexes and star breeding. Well creativity is like the dinosaurs, and studios and regulations are like the scientist trying to regulate. Life will find a way.