I think an important thing to point out, is that residuals exist in place of royalties.

Royalties are a percentage of profit from work you own or created. Since studios typically buy scripts and claim full ownership (and authorship -- which is primarily a very American interpretation of copyright) the writer's guild set up Residuals as a replacement.

In theory, they are the same thing, but avoid a semantic technicality that producers were able to easily exploit.

The irony is the harder studios squeeze writers to limit back end participation and lower residual payment, the more incentive writers have to fight for authorship -- which potentially cuts out a much larger chunk before even proving successful or not.

Hollywood business practice is not only greedy, but self destructive.

James, thanks for that point. Re giving up rights of authorship: That was the proverbial deal with the devil for whch Hwood writers get paid a lot more money than in other countries, but the whole diminishment of the writer starts right there.

Yeah, I'm not saying that the giving up authorship thing is right or wrong. Just that it is the situation.

Both extremes are prone to exploitation. And both can produce as equally horrific end product (ie terrible films).

It's a dilemma that is somewhat unique to film. Television and Comicbooks tend to deal with it in a much "nicer" fashion, but still have their faults. Film is the one place where authorship is still a highly contentious subject because the end "creation" is not the result of any one individual.

In the future, I could see cross platform media stuff having equally as problematic issues with authorship -- if not moreso. Who is the author of the videogame based on the movie? The writer? The director? The CEO of the video game company? The writer(s) on the videogame? The publisher as a whole? The guy who writes the code?

It's incredibly muddy.

I've been fascinated by creator's rights since I was little (probably a result of the creation of IMAGE COMICS when I was pretty young).

And still blown away that copyright hasn't had any major overhauls since 1978 -- Yeah, like nothing of note has happened since then.

Try 2 or 3 revolutions that are on par to the Industrial Revolution in that short timespan. An interconnectedness and dependency on IP rights like we've never seen before in the history of humanity.

But yeah, let's use 40+ year old law that doesn't even know what computers are :p.

Ah, you got me started!