(no subject)

further thoughts inspired by this post, which i have kept off my reblog and am putting here instead

1) this is the second time I'm seeing allegations that some decision a media company is making is because they're trying to screw the unions, with no argument given beyond someone on the internet said so (first time was about mcu using cgi instead of props). is there a more detailed/rigorous version of this argument somewhere?

2) I wonder what the "it should be legal to get paid for fanfic"* crowd thinks about this. surely if it's legal for me to take a corporation's intellectual property, adapt it, and make money of it without their permission, it should be equally legal for the corporation to do the same to my creative works without my permission.

3) if it were actually possible to replace tv/movie writer jobs with lifting a fic from the internet, then media companies should absolutely be doing that. there's plenty of original writing out there under very permissive licenses, and plenty of writers that wrote stuff with no expectation of ever getting paid that would be happy to give you a license for a pretty small amount of money. in the universe where this somehow obviates the jobs of screenwriters, or maybe lets you replace N writers with one writer plus internet fic, then go right ahead and do that. we don't demand that companies pay their programmers to rewrite open source software for the sake of creating jobs, why should we do that for screenwriters?

*yes, yes, the legality of making money off fanfic is more complicated than that. let this stand for the proposition "you should be confident that if you start charging money for your fanfic nobody will sue you, and if they do sue it'll be obvious to everyone involved that you'll win"