The union and representatives of the studios have come to an agreement and sent a proposal to the writers for approval. Everyone expects this to come on Monday, and we’ll have new TV shows and movies to look forward to shortly after that.

I’m sure I can speak for TV fans everywhere in saying, “It’s about time.”

What I find enormously entertaining is that the core of this strike was about compensating writers for re-broadcast (typically on the internet) of shows that they’d already been compensated for on original broadcast.

Whether you agree with this underlying philosophy of compensation or not, it’s remarkable to watch the studios on the one hand saying, “hey, we already paid you, get your hand out of the pot”, and on the other hand saying to users who want to share videos on the net, “hey, we know you already paid for that, but cough it up again.”

In the end, it’s about what’s legal, not what’s moral. And that’s the way it should be – laws are how we as a society decide what is “right”.

The law has all kinds of application to copyright. One of the most infamous is that 50 years after the death of the original creator, copyright on that work expires, and the work enters the public domain. Whether this is fair or not is something you can debate, but it IS the law. Many companies make their living, quite legally, by taking these works and delivering them to new readers for a profit, whether in the form of new editions, or audiobooks, or movies.

There is a time honored tradition here of people being compensated for their works, then having that work ‘augmented’ by better production or distribution. As new revenue streams are created, the law, and commercial agreements like that of the writers guild, determine who gets compensated and how much.

Maybe now that this issue of internet re-broadcast is being addressed by industry, they’ll figure out a way to let people watch the shows they want, when they want, where they want, for a reasonable price. God knows they haven’t figured out how to do it yet. And thank god that in the meantime other companies are figuring out ways to get people what they want to watch.

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