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Bloodsucking Hollywood Unions Trying to Get Even More

We've been hearing rumblings of discontent from powerful labor unions that represent writers, directors and actors in Hollywood, concerning compensation for imaginary income brought from the numerous platforms of digital distribution.

With profits and business models not even in place yet, this is an ignorant stand to take. It's like taking a stand against something that might happen sometime, so we've got to deal with it now. This is just plain stupidity.

Nobody is trying to screw anybody out of anything, nobody has anything to screw anybody with. No company has figured out the forms that online businesses will need to take, or how to really make money from them; it's all experimental at this time.

In this case it's the unions that are trying to do the screwing of the studios. Last year alone, the union members received around $570 million in DVD residuals. That's an increase of 159% over the $220 million paid out 10 years ago. That's the formula now being used to reward digital downloads. The greedy unions want more, no matter how it may hurt the industry.

At the same time studios' revenue share has dropped to one-third while the revenue connected to supplemental markets (like DVDs) are now two-thirds of the overall revenue instead of one third. That's just another way of saying that workers start getting residuals before the studios even begin to make a profit.

And the Hollywood union leaders are trying to make it look like the system is unfair to their members while a studio could in reality take big losses on a film while union members take in extra income. This is one area where I side with the studios. There won't be a Hollywood if they give in on this issue.

The unions want even more than the current contract offers, even while many studios are reeling and struggling to be profitable. The unions are creating a non-existant hypothetical world that they want to make a deal on. They're the ones that are living in neverland.

The studios need to have the guts to take a stand here and stick it out no matter what happens. Nothing can really be negotiated until the new digital realities are finally understood and worked out. That's going to take years.

For now they should transfer residuals to net profits rather than gross sales. I think their future depends upon it.