The Writers are right.

"Some of the content is out of the hands of the networks and the writers. This is no different than the problems that the music industry had with illegal downloading. Notice that there has never been a musician's strike however, they only threatened and followed up on litigation. This means that there must be some difference. Legally downloaded songs that are paid for by the customer do pay out royalties to the artists. This goes for ringtones as well. Musicians are benefitting from the digital age while writers are being given the middle finger." Would that not be the same for the fact of the writers? There are ways do legally download different tv show and etc. The fact that the musicians getting the royalties would be the same as the musicians getting their royalties. Another point is the fact that the writers, while they are writing the script, are never actually seen on screen like those who are paid to be there. Musicians can also get royalties because it's their work, and theirs alone. However, when it comes to movies, shows, etc., it's not just the writer, it's the actors, the actresses, the extras, that also pull a major part of the scene together. Also in enduring between a musician and a writer, you talk about how musicians are benefitting from the digital age while writers are not. However, you have to keep in mind that musicians also can be more valuable than writers in a sense. A musician has multiple things to do in a day, from writing music to playing a gig. If you're one of the major bands or artists out there, and you don't get what you want, you could refuse to do something that could potentially lose your record company a lot of money. For example. Say Fallout Boy wasn't getting its royalties anymore, so it decided to stop the rest of the tour. That would cause so much money lost, because the company would need to refund tickets. Perhaps they just refuse to work on their new album, shoving the release date even farther? That costs the record company even more money. Now, you may say that the company could just fire the band, but then that would be a huge band for someone else to contract, which would equal a lot of potential gain lost. However, it is not such with writers. Say a writer got extremely ticked off because of this instance, and decided not to write? The director easily could fire said writer and hire another one, tell him how he wanted it to go, and have the new writer continue writing with a possibly different style. It doesn't effect his production much, and doesn't affect his income. " However the writers have contracts with the union and the studios they work for. Now that it is time to negotiate those contracts, the writers are asking for compensation for new revenue that was non-existent years ago." How many people's contracts are negotiable right now? How many have expired so they can be negotiated upon? The fact is, when the writer signed the contract, they agreed to so and so terms. If they have a problem with something mid contract, that is not the business's fault, and therefore the writers should wait until their contract has expired before attempting to change how much they're getting paid. If we have a strike every time someone's not happy with their wages, we'd would have strikes every day from all parts of the economy, and NOTHING would get done. Life would halt to a standstill.