Wanna do something good for your business? Support the Writers Guild strike. Why is that good for your creative business? Because these people are fighting for exact the same thing we do: payments for the value of their work.
The media corporations and producers, etc., don’t want to pay writers for when they sell additional copies of shows on DVD and the internet. These are new uses. Think about how many tv shows you now see for sale on DVD–this never used to happen! And downloads! Anyway, they don’t want to pay them at all for any of these “additional uses” to be truthful, and if they win, you can bet it will be a thousand times harder for a photographer to convince a client that being paid for each usage is fair. They’ll start to demand more and more be thrown in, under rubriques like “promotion” or “collateral.”
So, if you want to do something great for your business, support the strike. Bring food to the picket lines, write posts about how important these issues are for ALL creatives, don’t cross the picket lines, etc. Helping other creatives fight the same fights we must face is the honorable thing to do.
Awesome post, and I completely agree.
I’m not a creative arts person, but I am a union member, and they make all the difference.
Cheers!!