- Disney’s writer wage theft, a year on: Still work to do.
- Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
- This day in history: 2002, 2007, 2012, 2021
- Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming/recent appearances, current writing projects, current reading
In November 2020, SFWA came forward with a stunning accusation: Disney had told the beloved writer Alan Dean Foster (author of the original, bestselling Star Wars novelization) that they would not ever pay him the royalties he was owed.
https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/19/disneymustpay/#disneymustpay
Disney argued that Foster’s contract – where he was guaranteed wages for his creative labor on the Star Wars book, which was written before the film was complete and formed the basis for many elements of the final movie – was with Lucasfilm, not Disney. Disney said that when it acquired Lucasfilm, it only acquired its assets (including the right to continue publishing Foster’s book), but not its liabilities (including the obligation to pay royalties to Foster).
The contract lawyer’s technical term for this is tu stupri cognati mihi (“are you fucking kidding me”) (I made that up, but it really should be true). In truth, this “we only acquire assets, not liabilities” argument is grounded in the idea that the workers Disney stole from couldn’t afford to fight them.
That’s where SFWA came in: as an association, it had resources that Foster himself – elderly, sick with cancer, caring for a a sick wife – couldn’t marshal. The org kicked off #DisneyMustPay, a shaming campaign that called on Disney to honor its obligations to the creative workers who made the company its billions.
The campaign rapidly picked up many supporters, especially among creative workers, who understood that if Disney’s theory about acquiring assets and not liabilities was true, then no one was safe. Any royalty-based arrangement – with a label, studio or publisher – could be upended by incorporating a numbered LLC in a corporate crime haven like Delaware or Nevada or South Dakota, and transfering the assets to it. The liabilities, meanwhile, would be owed by another numbered company that could be discarded.
As the campaign picked up steam and more writers came forward, the full scope of Disney’s wage-theft was revealed. The Alan Dean Foster heist wasn’t an isolated incident: it was part of a systematic program of theft from a whole cohort of writers, stemming from Disney’s orgy of acquisitions that saw it merge with Lucas, Fox, Pixar, and other media companies. Disney took the position that all of these corporate mergers only transfered the literary assets – the right to publish – but not the obligations – the requirement to pay authors.
https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/29/writers-must-be-paid/#pay-the-writer
It’s been a year since SFWA published its followup report, revealing the widespread practice of wage theft. On the eve of that anniversary, the group has published a followup:
https://www.writersmustbepaid.org/
They note that Disney has paid the highest-profile writers what it owed them, but that the company has refused to engage in the systematic accounting and negotiations that SFWA demanded, and that many lower-profile writers are still waiting for justice.
“You still refuse to recognize your obligations to lesser-known authors who wrote media tie-in works for Marvel, for Star Wars, for Aliens, for Predator, for Buffy: TVS, and more, universes that you’ve bought the rights to, along with the obligations to those creators.”
The SFWA #DisneyMustPay task force (Neil Gaiman, Tess Gerritsen, Lee Goldberg, Mary Robinette Kowal and Chuck Wendig) note that Disney continues to reprint and reissue works by these unpaid authors, all under the pretense that they are not owed a penny, nor the courtesy of an accounting or even notification that their work is reissued.
This is shameful, and it points to the hollowness of Disney’s long-running holy war to get us all to “respect copyright.” Disney respects copyright only to the extent that it serves as a charter for corporate abuse of creators, or a means by which Disney can reach beyond its corporate walls and dictate the conduct of its competitors or other industries. When it comes to copyright as a tool for securing the rightful wages of creative workers, Disney exhibits contempt far beyond the taunts of The Pirate Bay or the insouciance of bootleg DVD hawkers in a night market.
Copyright’s power to create worker power has always been oversold, mostly by giant entertainment companies who correctly understood that the more copyright creators got, the more copyright they could expropriate through non-negotiable contracts. Copyright isn’t useless to creators, but it is also no substitute for fair contracting laws, labor organizing, and antitrust enforcement.
This coming September, Beacon Press will publish “Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We’ll Win Them Back,” in which Rebecca Giblin and I explain how the creative labor market was rigged, and how to think beyond copyright as a tool for unrigging them:
In the book, we talk about Disney’s theft from Foster and other writers, and analyze the legal, economic and political structures that led to that situation – the “monopolistic flywheel” that let corporate robber barons go from strength to strength, so they could shift more dollars from
