Beginning at noon today and continuing through Monday morning, there's a virtual picket line walking the Internet highways and byways in support of the Hollywood Writers Strike.
As in all negotiations, the issues are complicated -- and simple: Writers want a cut of revenue derived by the media congloms from "new media." (Writers Guild of America has a video, Why We Fight, on YouTube, natch, and Wikipedia has an entry.) For the moment, the concern is the "Internet," which I put in quotes because the distribution channels are now so much more complex than that word implies. Remember those holograms I mentioned a couple dozen posts back - what about when Grey's Anatomy plays out in your living room?
As a writer, it is hard not to support this strike. Writers, including us, receive payments when their/our work sells, small percentages ultimately of what the producers, in our case, publishers, receive. Screen and TV writers receive "residuals" when their work is "repurposed" in certain media but not all. If you buy a DVD of a movie, a fraction of what you pay goes to the writers involved. But if you download that same movie, the writers receive nothing as of now. Fair's fair and if the media company gains revenue (they do principally through advertising for online material at the moment), writers should too.
Thus I and most writer friends support the strike, which, of course, I learned about on Facebook, where a group has formed to support the virtual picket.