Salary Caps For Actors?
One of the problems with using a "Shock and Awe" strategy in battle is that you can never tell if it works. Imagine Mel Gibson's William Wallace in Braveheart announcing to his small army of Scotsmen, "Aye, the only reason we beat the fooken English is because we lifted our kilts and waved our genitals aroond". A blood spattered Celtic warrior turns and replies, "Nah, fightin' for our homes and families gave us the courage to defeat them".
"It was the cock-waving I tell yer!" screams Wallace.
The RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) has favoured the cock-waving approach in its battle against its perceived enemy (its owners' customers). The plan is to sue large numbers of people and publicize the actions in the hope everyone will be too scared to oppose them and, after years of using this tactic it seems to be failing.
Patti Santangelo is the most recognisable person to stand up and fight the RIAA's accusations in court, and just when things seemed to be going the RIAA's way, too!
The MPAA (Motion Picture Associatioin of America) on the other hand has tried the "surgical strike" method, and has been having much more sucess. Their actions last week against a number of Torrent and Newsgroup sites have already seen a number of those targeted close shop. More will probably capitulate as the MPAA drags out the court procedings and stretches the indexing sites' legal budgets to zero.
The RIAA and MPAA have so far been reactionary in their dealings with new p2p technology. Little, if any, effort has been made by them to address the root cause of their problems - perceived loss of income.
The typical tech company approach to this kind of problem is to get a bunch of smart guys, stick them in a room with tens of millions of dollars worth of cool toys and tell them to come up with something brilliant. It works more often than not, as well. Simultaneously, company executives sit down and work out how to fight a holding action against their competitor. How long can they maintain their current profit margins? How can they reduce overheads? How much coffee to the engineers need before the "something brilliant" is ready for market?
This is NOT something the movie studios and record companies are doing. There is, however, one tried and true way of reducing costs during tough times: salary caps.
I don't know about you, but whenever I see some actor receiving a $25 million dollar payment for doing a movie I get really worried for the movie studio. Don't they know they're being decimated by file sharing? Haven't they heard that their entire industry is poised on the edge of bankruptcy? How can they possibly afford to fork out twenty five million bucks and continue saying that I am the f*cking problem to their bottom line?!?!?
Unfortunately, the entertainment industry isn't run along the lines of a free market and even "free" markets are regulated to make sure they stay free. If there weren't regulations in place, they'd be called "anarchic markets" and there'd be thriving, legal industries producing and selling everything from nuclear bombs to organs harvested from African children.
So No. You can't do whatever the hell you feel like in a free market. We came out of the trees, got civilized and made rules which can be changed as and when they need to be to ensure there's some level of fairness in the world.
Salary caps were introduced to professional sports to maintain the competetive environment, otherwise a rich team would simply buy all the best players and win every game. As you can guess, this would be pretty damned boring to the fans who'd quickly lose interest. As people stop going to games, less money comes in. When income drops to a certain level, the game goes bankrupt.
It's well worth noting as well that salary caps were partly introduced to professional sports to keep the fans happy. I imagine it would be very difficult to watch a player earing $20 million a year screw up and continue believing they were worth $20 million a year. Anger towards the player for dropping the ball, anger towards the team for overpaying someone who drops the ball, anger towards the league for crying hardship this season and putting up ticket prices...
Special Competition!
Pick the three things you'd most like to be enforced on the MPAA's member studios:
1. Half of all actor salaries over $10 million dollars must be given to charity.
2. No actor or director may recieve more than $20 million for their work on a film.
3. 20% of all profits over $100 million made on any movie must be used to fund projects by emerging directors.
4. All sequals must contain 90% of the "stars" that appeared in the first (sucessful) movie.
5. People or companies with a financial interests in a film must be disclosed in the credits.
6. Songs appearing in a film's "official soundtrack" must be audible for at least 20 seconds during the film.
7. Any actor nominated for an Oscar must have performed in at least one stage production during the previous year.
8. No studio executive may receive more than $5 million dollars in salary or benefits while their employer is engaged in legal action against individual file sharers.
9. All studios must give 5% of their after tax profits to an independent organization for the purposes of commercializing p2p technologies.
10. Any person working for an MPAA member studio must take a short course in alternative licensing, such as the Creative Commons.
Answers on a postcard please. Or better yet, send them directly to the MPAA (and you never know, they might send you a poster or something).
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posted by Alex H at 7:43 PM
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