Will the parties be able to reach a fair and swift conclusion of this issue? We certainly hope so. Strikes like this have a ripple effect. The economic repercussions reach far beyond the Hollywood studios where so many of these programs are produced. We only need to look back twenty years to the last writers’ strike to see evidence of that. But these are creative people, right? They, more than anyone, should be able to craft a workable solution.

Even if the strike has been settled by the time you read this, don’t be fooled. Issues regarding rights sharing of new and “yet to be developed” technology will continue to crop up. The 1988 writers’ strike coincided with the growth of cable television as a distribution channel for writers’ work. In the 1990s, publishing houses scrambled to rewrite contracts to address rights sharing issues for the newly emerging e-book, print on demand, and CD-Rom technology. Most recently, in May of this year, Simon and Schuster was accused of attempting to “electronically warehouse” author rights when it changed the language in its publishing contracts to reflect its view that a book remains “in print” as long as an electronic file exists from which the book can be printed on demand, a change that effectively eliminated authors’ reversionary rights. (Simon & Schuster took a significant amount of heat from writers and agents when it announced this change and eventually backed off, stating that it would agree instead to a “revenue based threshold” to determine whether books were “in print.”)