Check, Please - online services fees to come - Internet/Web/Online Service Information

Industry Standard, The, July 23, 2001 by Harry Shearer

THE LAND OF CONTENT IS NO LONGER THE LAND OF THE FREE. HAS THE WEB GROWN UP AFTER ALL?

Stop me if you've heard this one, but the Internet free lunch is over. Again.

Net users are still reeling from the actors' commercial strike last year (I write as a member of both of the unions that struck, full disclosure department), when, for the first time, the owners of voices in commercials won the right to be paid when those spots were streamed online. The result, as you've surely noticed, is that many commercial radio stations have ceased streaming, and many others have installed software that attempts to block or remove the affected spots.

Then in June, the Supreme Court decided that freelance writers ought to be able to choose whether or not their printed work can be redistributed online, in effect giving them the right to bargain for a nutty little thing called payment. This principle, which seems almost basic, turns out to be something that has to be fought for more regularly than a prime parking space in West Hollywood, Calif.

Publishers have reacted with a solemn pledge to remove the writings of freelancers from their Web archives. (Staff writers, for the most part, have no rights.) In the case of the New York Times, the new policy was announced in a tone of deep and sad regret at the loss of historical completeness. We were almost dared not to notice that the publisher could have, for the sake of archival integrity, chosen to offer the writers in question some compensation for the reuse. But sadness and concern for history do not yet appear to have gotten as far down the hall as the comptroller's office.

As an actor, I'm familiar with the history of what our unions call "residual" payments: how hard it was to convince producers to pay us when our performances were rerun; how Lew Wasserman (then head of MCA) colluded with Ronald Reagan (then head of the Screen Actors' Guild and an MCA employee) to exempt from residual payments all films made before 1948; how to a casual observer it may seem as though we're getting paid for doing nothing (though in reality we are being compensated not just for the reuse of work we've already done, but, more important, for the fact that we are being forced to compete with ourselves -- each program that's rerun is another program that doesn't have to be made).

One is tempted to say publishers and Netcasters have brought this situation on themselves. In the old days, back when "information wants to be free" could be written with a straight face, the widest possible circulation of digital data was the only goal. But then Web sites got expensive to run and "business models" became fashionable, if not downright essential, at which point voice actors and freelance writers could well be excused for demanding, "Why not us?"

Content providers have been warning Net users for years that we'll eventually have to pay for this stuff, although few of them have made the threat stick. It was a thrill in 1995 to know that your words or your voice were reaching Kathmandu and Sydney and Dakar Simultaneously. But, as in so much else in life, when the thrill has gone, only the money remains.

Harry Shearer (lemail@interworld.net) is the writer and director of the forthcoming digital film, Teddy Bears' Picnic.