I hope you weren’t offended. You just aren’t smiling in the pic and you look very serious. As in “one serious dude.” As in “don’t mess with me, I’m a mommy and I have a whole bucket full of ‘time out’ with your name on it.” As in “people have scammed me before and you mess with me sucka I’m goin’ to take you out.”

Please don’t hurt me.

It’s pretty pathetic that writers have to go on strike to get the compensation that they deserve. The writing carries the show, the movie, the sitcom–without good writing you have nothing.

IIRC for me electronic rights became a “standard clause” in first rights contracts I was signing back in ‘90 or so. I wasn’t bright enough to figure out that, while I could resell print articles beyond the first rights, the internet is forever.

I’m smarter now. Wait, no I’m not.

I think I signed a first rights contract today that included unlimited rights on Mars. You don’t think that will come back to bite me do you?

I think we are in such a transitional time in terms of content delivery writers are going to have a tough time of it. Let’s say they get rights to a bigger share of DVD sales–DVD’s are already yesterday’s technology. On demand is quickly replacing it. But what will come next? How long will it be before writers get a piece of that pie?

And how many of us are now self-publishing and keeping the whole pie? That doesn’t work with television/film writers, but freelancers can certainly get a bigger paycheck if they are willing to do their own marketing.

We’ll see how this all shakes out. Hopefully any new agreement will take into account content delivery methods yet to be created.