Entertainment’s future on the Internet

I wanted to applaud Patrick Goldstein for saying out loud in his column [“The Studios Play to Win,” Dec. 11] what many of us walking the Writers Guild of America picket lines have been silently wondering for some time now. If the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers is bound and determined to pay writers virtually nothing for the use of their material in new media, why are we continuing to negotiate with them? If there are in fact large sums to be made on the Internet, why are we asking the AMPTP for permission to do so?

Perhaps the WGA leadership’s next call should be made to Google (a very forward-thinking company that might very well be interested in becoming the first online, signatory studio).

David Dean Bottrell

Los Angeles

THERE are two points to make about Goldstein’s column. First, he says that the studios’ “ultimatum” on Friday was “asking the writers to give up much of their core Internet residuals proposal. . . . “ That is incorrect. We asked that the WGA remove from the table its demands to expand jurisdiction to cover reality and animation programming, to engage in “sympathy strikes” when other unions picket, to allow outsiders to decide what the “fair market” value of certain transactions are, rather than the market itself, and to allow their compensation to be tied to a distributor’s revenue stream rather than producer’s revenue.

Those proposals do not focus on new media. They have everything to do with the guild’s stated attempts to expand power and to “reach up to the mothership” of parent corporations, as WGA West President Patric Verrone told the New York Times.

The AMPTP has made a series of proposals to grant writers jurisdiction, compensation and residuals in significant areas of new media, above and beyond the payments they currently receive (such as for digital downloads). Those proposals are not “take it or leave it,” and we remain ready to negotiate the details once the guild drops unreasonable demands.

The second thing to point out about Goldstein’s column is that he recognizes that there are other new media opportunities “outside of the traditional studio model,” but he doesn’t take his argument to its logical conclusion. It is because the Internet is such a “wild west,” freewheeling frontier of opportunity that we cannot tie our hands, either as producers or writers, to 20th century rules that will kill our chances to succeed in such a hyper-competitive environment.

Goldstein cites Google, Yahoo and others and speculates about what they may do to create content in the future, but would these new media forces want to obligate themselves to rules and compensation schedules that weren’t developed with their business realities in mind?

When it comes to the new media, the only “sure thing” is that we will fail if we tie ourselves to old economy ways. The writers might want to start “digging for themselves,” as Goldstein suggests, but if either side tries digging completely on its own, they’ll find not the gold of which Goldstein writes but rather a grave of their own making.

Jesse Hiestand

Communications Director

Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers