It's fun when subject matter from two courses converges. In this case, it's my E-Commerce and Negotiations course materials that are converging because the Writer's Guide of America (WGA) has gone on strike, partly over how much they get paid when the shows they write on get downloaded. Nate Anderson over at Ars Technica explains it really well:

No one is Hollywood is quite sure how this whole "Internet thing" will affect the TV and movie businesses, but the writers and producers both know one thing: they don't want to give an inch of ground when it comes to pricing residuals for Internet distribution of shows. After months of fruitless negotiations on a new contract, the Writers Guild of America announced publicly today that it would be going on strike, in large part over "new media" concerns. If you thought late-night television wasn't funny now, wait until the writers quit.

Writers get paid "residuals" whenever a show they've worked on or a movie they've helped write gets sold on DVD or aired in syndication, and these residuals can make up a healthy part of a working scriptwriter's income. The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) insists that the residual rate for new media uses be fixed at the current DVD rate. The writers want the DVD formula—and the new media rate along with it—to be increased.

Our Negotiation's professor, John Onto, has taken great pains to warn us about the dangers of boiling the negotiation down to a single, contentious, value-claiming issue. When that happens, the negotiation becomes a bargain in which one side will always "win" and one side will always "lose" [1]. Unfortunately, that is exactly what seems to have happened here. Oh well. At least it's a good learning opportunity for us Negotiations students!

Footnotes

[1] Unless, of course, a creative, possibly value-creating solution to the deadlock can be found.