Jonathan V. Last writes in the Weekly Standard:
The Hollywood writers’ strike has placed the Democratic frontrunners in something of a bind, forcing them to choose between unions and the entertainment industry executives who are some of their most important big-money contributors. The responses of Senators Clinton, Obama, and Edwards have been revealing.
A strike has long been in the offing. The two unions that make up the Writers Guild of America voted overwhelmingly (by over 90 percent of their 12,000 members) to authorize a walkout on October 18. Their main point of conflict with the Alliance of Motion Pictures and Television Producers (which bargains on behalf of the movie and TV studios) was the royalties associated with downstream revenue.
Profits from computer downloads of movies and TV shows are the most contentious issue. Currently, content is distributed on the Internet in two ways: Some movies and TV shows are purchased and downloaded through services such as iTunes or Amazon Unbox; in these cases the writers get a negligible portion of the take (a third of a cent for every dollar of profit). Alternatively, studios allow viewers to stream TV shows (not movies, yet) from their websites. The studios sell advertising within these streams, but have wiggled around having to share this revenue with writers by labeling the streams "promotions" rather than "broadcasts." This prevents writers from getting any share at all of the profits. The Writers Guild strike is, at heart, an attempt by writers to claim a small sliver of these two pies. Their position is not unreasonable.
