What makes a writer's work different from an architect's?

We're into the third month of the 2007 Writers' Strike, and it's still dragging on. People in the entertainment industry lost their jobs as the strike moved into the holiday season, and the economic impact of the strike is probably going to be felt in the television and film industry for years to come. So what's with the writers, anyway? What makes them so special?
I've been thinking about this a lot - I support the writers. I'm glad the DGA was able to make a deal with the Producers, but the WGA is still struggling with what's on offer. I was trying to think of a "real world" comparison, and it occurred to me that something like a building is an artistic expression of an architect and a lot of artisans, but when the architect sells the design, there's generally no reuse clause, or concerns over intellectual property over the long run like there is with written material.
When Charles Dickens was writing for The Strand , he was paid by the word (which is one reason his prose tends to go on - he needed to put food on the table!). Long-term ownership of written material is a recent development, really, and the copyright law has changed over the past century to safeguard a writer's legacy beyond his life. At one time that wasn't the case. But why is ownership of a writer's work worth preserving in that fashion?

Because we've learned the hard way that nothing stays the same with the written word. Just because it's been published in a magazine doesn't mean that magazine will go digital. Or that written work can't be adapted for radio, television, or film. Or that new methods of distribution won't be developed later that you and I would never have dreamed (okay, those of us who are science fiction fans can dream of a lot of ways, but you get my drift). The written word of only a few years ago had only certain ways it could be distributed - on paper, recorded for radio or tape/CD, on television, on film, and on videotape. Then came DVDs. And then came the self-fulfilling prophecy that is the Internet. ITunes. Unbox. Instant access to everything you'd ever want to watch. Free. But someone's getting paid somewhere - a lot of this "free" content is ad-supported. Which means there is money changing hands in order to provide the material in a new way. So someone is benefitting. Yes, there are costs to consider in providing servers to host and stream media, and there's software to buy to put on those servers, and there are geeks required to keep those servers running.

But, there's apparently enough happening with those live streams that CBS, when they factored iTunes and streaming media usage of Jericho, found that a show whose Nielson ratings were pathetic, had actually grown dramatically in terms of audience through the new media outlets. A lot of these network free video tools require that you watch the shows with the commercials intact. The company whose commercial is playing is paying some kind of fee to have that commercial shown.

But the writer who wrote that show is getting nothing for all those showings. The network is benefitting, the advertiser is benefitting. But the creative folks who actually made the show in the first place aren't seeing any benefit.

But how is that different from an architect designing a building for a client, and not expecting some form of royalty payment for use of the building? A building, while it can be used for many things, cannot be presented as anything other than what it is. It can't be digitized and transmitted to a new location or cloned, so that it can begin a new and separate life as something other than what it is. The uses of a building are known and finite - at least in this dimension - while the product of the written word is currently ever changing.

So I hope that soon the producers and the writers will be able to find common ground, but that common ground has got to recognize that the work of the writers underpins everything, and the brave new world we face today is not going to stop changing any time soon - and rights and royalty agreements need to reflect that, for the writers, the actors, the directors and the creative people who make the shows we love happen.

Once more into the breach!

Okay, this is the third or fourth time I've had a go at blogging. The software didn't work out quite the way I'd hoped when hosted directly on my server, so I thought I'd give Blogger a try - I've seen a number of blogs done using this particular product, and I like the look and feel. So ... here goes!


Well, I've been flying so far under the radar for so long, I expect a lot of people have forgotten about me. The past few years have been challenging - my previous blog actually covered a lot of that, with a major car accident that put my Mom in the hospital, my two beloved cats Micki and Ryan passing away within days of each other, my Mom's subsequent illness (a bad reaction to a rheumatoid arthritis drug), and a work schedule that still leaves me breathless on occasion. Add to that a couple more deaths in the family of the human variety, as well.


On the up side, I do still have my Mom, and my grandmother (she'll be 99 in June!), I still have four of my six cats (Neffer, Max, Buddha, and Zen). I just got a promotion at work, proving that the long hours and hard work were noticed. I'm still quite a ways away from what I used to make in Massachusetts, but with the car paid off, the raise that came with the promotion is very nice indeed.


My health has been iffy - I had a cancer scare a few months ago, and thankfully the biopsy came back benign. I spent the holidays sick with the mutating cold - I'm still dealing with residual symptoms, but yesterday - the 20th of January - was the first day I'd actually felt well since Christmas Eve. I'd planned all of this activity - from getting organized to starting an exercise program - over the holidays, and all I could handle was laying on the couch catch up on my recordings.


But at fifty - about to turn fifty-one later this week - I do really need to start thinking a little more seriously about my health. Women on my Mom's side of the family live a long time, and I think I'd like to try that, only healthy. So I've started to make some small adjustments in my diet - I want to end up with something I can actually sustain - and I'm clearing an area to start with yoga and tai chi again. And we'll see where that takes me.

And I'm reaching out. I've just reopened my trading site after more than a year of no updates. I've posted on the Vendredi Press Yahoogroups list that I'm interested in writing fiction and letting others post on the list. I'm in the process of contacting my old friends to reopen communications. Again, we'll see where that takes me.

Fannishly, I haven't been active for a couple of years. It's strange that I got back into trading as a result of the zine. I wanted to convert Magnificent 7 to DVD in order to write a Mag7/Stargate SG-1 crossover. I never finished the crossover - although I do still have notes - but I've ended up building my program collection considerably, I found some old friends in the process, discovered new ones, and really drifted away from fandom in the process. I haven't been to a con in over a year. A year! But I'm hoping to go to at least one if not two or three in the coming year, and I actually had an idea for a story the other night. A full-blown, I have to get this written down story. So, the Vendredi Press list that I had planned to shut down may yet live again, and I may yet write more fiction. This is why I learned years ago never to say I'm leaving fandom - I take breaks now and then, but I never leave.

In terms of the trading hobby, as I said, I just updated my list for the first time in a year. My original DVD recorder has been acting up, so I bought a new one, with a larger hard drive, at Christmas, plus I got another Panasonic with points so I can finalize discs made on the original machine. Among these machines and the shortened season resulting from the writer's strike, I'm finally catching up. Which means I will hopefully finally have time to transfer some of those old shows that I got the recorder to do in the first place!

So, I'm going to try to keep this up. I'll see how it goes - my first blog hosted on my web site ended up being filled with really unpleasant spam comments, and the software didn't allow for me to shut down comments to only registered users. The next blog didn't have a place for comments. I'll try opening the comments on this one and see how it plays out.