With Strike Threat Looming, WGA Makes Inroads on 'Webisodes'

The Writers Guild of America (WGA) is finally making inroads towards full union representation of writers who work on Internet-only video entertainment -- typically called Webisodes -- which are short but fully self-contained stories that exist as add-on content for popular shows such as 24, or Lost.

If the Guild doesn't get its way during this years contract negotiations, even under the best of circumstances you'll find yourself facing a massive influx of reality-only television shows. Your favorite shows will start feeding off of rejected but stock piled scripts written months and possibly years ago. If worst comes to worst -- and it very well may this time -- you could find yourself without new television entertainment of any kind, period.

The WGA has been fighting a losing battle over the past six years which has seen few if any gains in contract negotiations, which have taken place under leadership that has since been thrown out on the street for failing to satisfy writers demands to fix an age old and financially painful mistake of years past.

After the dust had settled in Sony v. Universal City Studios where the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled that home video recorders -- the about-to-be-forgotten VCR -- were in fact legal, the WGA and Association of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) sat down for their regularly scheduled negotiations. Though these things are not written in stone, one thing we know for certain is that the Guild leadership during this time did not foresee a bright and financially significant future for home video sales.

Because writers are forced to give up the copyright to their scripts when they sell them to the studios, they are not entitled to royalties in the same way that novelists are. Instead, the Guild has a similar system called residuals, which require writers to be paid for subsequent sales of the movie or television show that resulted from their script.