My younger brother is on the WGA board, and we've had discussions about the Internet in the past. I think they are making a mistake looking for a fixed rate for each show or episode. The problem with their negotiations is the writers feel they got screwed on DVDs and don't want to see that happen again.
As some one who has been involved in the Web for longer than most, I got to say, the people envisioning how the Web will make money are very much stuck in twentieth-century thought process. The people using the Web aren't. The content providers are thinking they can just take what works in the old distribution method and use it on the Web. The people buying think things have changed and they should get to participate in the savings.
To sell a song, movie, article, etc. for roughly the same as in twentieth-century distribution paradigm won't work for buyers. To charge 99¢ a song or $14 for a movie doesn't work because the buyers are more than aware selling something over the Internet saves money. It costs no more to distribute the 100,000,000 copy as it does to distribute the first.
The answer could be micro charges. Selling 100,000,000 songs for a nickel makes more money than selling 1,000,000 songs for 99¢ ($5,000,000>$990,000. But producers can’t sell like this because previous deals are worked out with artists, etc… by the song, with artists getting a fixed amount per song. What need to happen are new negotiations that give producers opportunities to work with micro-charges, and still pay artists their fair share.
A print mechanism could be something like charging 0.1¢ per article accessed, with the charges accumulating or debiting from an account. Putting together distribution conglomerates, so the reader has access to a variety of sources would then make it more appealing for the reader.
Rather than Brad Klein getting a fixed amount for an article he writes, he would get a percentage. Say he writes an article that gets a million readers, at half a penny per reader, that would be $5,000 and he might have negotiated a 50 percent share, or $2,500 for himself. The more people willing to spend the 0.5¢ the more everyone makes, with almost no change to the distribution cost. (Of course the drawback would be if he only gets 1,000 hits, his share would be $2.50. But since content on the Internet can live forever, he might be getting those $2.50 cheques for years to come
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Micro-charging will also reduce the problem of piracy. Why steal what you can buy legitimately buy for half a penny?
Cheers,
Grandan King
I must confess that I've never trusted the Web. I've always seen it as a coward's tool. Where does it live? How do you hold it personally responsible? Can you put a distributed network of fiber-optic cable "on notice"? And is it male or female? In other words, can I challenge it to a fight?
--Stephen Colbert