Business Blog: Hoover’s Business Insight Zone

It shouldn’t be surprising that when you cross a group of clever writers — especially ones who seem to have found a collective backbone for this round of labor negotiations — you’ll find yourself taken to the woodshed rhetorically. Check out this video* advertising the writers’ case:

Calculating the leverage in this fight is a fascinating exercise. The media conglomerates (Disney, Viacom, GE, et al.) are big and rich and powerful, but the writers supply their lifeblood of narrative stories. More to the point, if Marc Andreesen is right about what the future may hold for a Hollywood in which content creators reign by seizing the means of production from their capitalist masters taking advantage of the frictionless distribution mechanisms of the Internet, it will be the writers (and directors etc.) who come out on top, simply because so many epochal changes in technology favor their interests.

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* Thanks to my pal David Parmet for the link.