This sounds like… really important? What the FUCK Disney??
They are just straight up not paying loyalties! “Disney’s argument is that they have purchased the rights but not the obligations of the contract.”
This is seriously dangerous to creators
Read the letter from Alan Dean Foster:
Dear Mickey,
We have a lot in common, you and I. We share a birthday: November 18. My dad’s nickname was Mickey. There’s more.
When you purchased Lucasfilm you acquired the rights to some books I wrote. STAR WARS, the novelization of the very first film. SPLINTER OF THE MIND’S EYE, the first sequel novel. You owe me royalties on these books. You stopped paying them.
When you purchased 20th Century Fox, you eventually acquired the rights to other books I had written. The novelizations of ALIEN, ALIENS, and ALIEN 3. You’ve never paid royalties on any of these, or even issued royalty statements for them.
All these books are all still very much in print. They still earn money. For you. When one company buys another, they acquire its liabilities as well as its assets. You’re certainly reaping the benefits of the assets. I’d very much like my miniscule (though it’s not small to me) share.
You want me to sign an NDA (Non-disclosure agreement) before even talking. I’ve signed a lot of NDAs in my 50-year career. Never once did anyone ever ask me to sign one prior to negotiations. For the obvious reason that once you sign, you can no longer talk about the matter at hand. Every one of my representatives in this matter, with many, many decades of experience in such business, echo my bewilderment.
You continue to ignore requests from my agents. You continue to ignore queries from SFWA, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. You continue to ignore my legal representatives. I know this is what gargantuan corporations often do. Ignore requests and inquiries hoping the petitioner will simply go away. Or possibly die. But I’m still here, and I am still entitled to what you owe me. Including not to be ignored, just because I’m only one lone writer. How many other writers and artists out there are you similarly ignoring?
My wife has serious medical issues and in 2016 I was diagnosed with an advanced form of cancer. We could use the money. Not charity: just what I’m owed. I’ve always loved Disney. The films, the parks, growing up with the Disneyland TV show. I don’t think Unca Walt would approve of how you are currently treating me. Maybe someone in the right position just hasn’t received the word, though after all these months of ignored requests and queries, that’s hard to countenance. Or as a guy named Bob Iger said….
“The way you do anything is the way you do everything.”
I’m not feeling it.
Alan Dean Foster
SIGNAL.
BOOST.
Because you know if Disney gets away with not paying creators, everyone else will want to see if they can get away with it.
First of all, yes to all of this.
But something I think should be highlighted is the difference between the Disney franchise model, and a lot of previous franchise models, and why the Disney model sucks.
If you, say, write an original novel, and it gets published in a traditional publishing house, they will give you a check up front and also pay you royalties, that is, a percentage of the profits the book makes. (If you’re asking “why don’t you get ALL the profit, if you’re the sole author?” the answer is that the editors, typesetters, printers, cover artist, advertisers, and bookstores need to get paid, too; they aren’t producing and selling your book out of the goodness of their heart.) If the book is a flop, you’ll get nothing but the up-front check; if it’s a smash hit that sells a lot really quickly and then gets forgotten about, you’ll get a lot of money in the first year and not much thereafter; if it becomes a classic or perennial favorite you will have a small but steady stream of revenue trickling in for years.
When Disney hires someone to create something for a franchise they own, they do not pay royalties. They never have, to the best of my knowledge. The contract is a strict one off, work-for-hire. You create something to their specifications, they give you a check, and off you go. If the thing you created is the greatest of its kind ever, you don’t get royalties. Disney can profit for the next century, but you don’t get anything. This is legal, because when you signed the contract you agreed to it–you got all your money up front, not tied to the success or failure of your creation. If your creation is a failure, this is a really good deal, because you’ll make more money. If your creation does medium-well, it’s a toss-up, because you might have made more money with royalties, but you might not; and the accounting and business angle is simpler if you get a lump sum vs. dribs and drabs trickling in for the next couple of years. But if your work is a great success … then not getting royalties for it means the contract was a really terrible deal for you and a great deal for Disney.
But the thing is, Disney has spent the last several years buying up franchises from other people and corporations. And some of those franchises did pay royalties, at least for some authors. See, especially back in the 70s through the 90s, if you wanted a big-name author to write a novelization or tie-in (and thus have a better chance of that book selling well), offering royalties was how you did it. Because sure, there were a lot of mid-list or bottom-list or newbie authors who would write work-for-hire (i.e. payment up front but no royalties) just because they needed the cash. For a newbie or bottom-list or mid-list author, they might actually make more money doing work-for-hire for a major franchise than they would writing their own original stuff. You churn out a novel to their specifications, you take your check, pay your bills, and then go back to writing the stuff you actually want to write. Which is why so many novelizations and tie-ins are mediocre at best. But a major author (who might do a better job, and who would attract readers who otherwise don’t bother with tie-ins and novelizations) wouldn’t take a contract like that because they’d make more money on their own stuff where they would get royalties.
Alan Dean Foster was one of the leading SF/F authors of the late 20th Century. And he had a positive talent for writing tie-ins and novelizations and making them really good. Which is why he got good contracts with royalties to write those books instead of them being work-for-hire, and also why many of those books are still in print and still selling steadily, today, literally 40 years later, decades after most of the other tie-ins and novelizations of that era are out of print.
So even after snaffling up all these other franchises, there probably aren’t too many authors who wrote books that Disney now owns the rights to who are due royalties. And most of the books Disney now owns where the authors are due royalties … it probably doesn’t matter much because the books are old enough that they haven’t sold many copies in the last decade or so, so it’s a moot point.
I bet that what happened was that Disney doesn’t have anyone on staff who actually handles figuring out who is owed royalties and how much, because … they’ve never had to deal with royalties because they do everything work-for-hire. So then Alan Dean Foster, one of the few people who a) wrote novels that Disney now owns the rights to, b) is entitled to royalties on them, and c) those novels actually sell enough on a regular basis to generate royalties, starts asking why he’s not getting his quarterly check. And Disney is like, who does this dude think he is, why should we pay him for books that he wrote forty years ago, he’s already been paid, we own the books now fair and square.
Except that’s not what the contract says. And now they’re trying to wiggle out of it.
I hope they get laughed out of court and have to pay not only the royalties but any legal bills Foster may have.
Just as the Mayans predicted, the apocalypse came with the signal of a cough.
these middle schoolers read better than my high school honors english class
I REALLY HAVE TO REBLOG THIS IM SORRY THE FUCKING TEACHER
“Stop being dead right now”
That’s the reaction of an adult who delights in what you just did, but is in the position of Enforcing The Rules, so they have to tell you to stop anyway
Every time I see that glee face he gets its like “fine I guess I’ll reblog”
Also reflecting on DWJ’s recurring take/assumption that in the absence of active emotional abuse to prevent it, youngest children in a family group will manifest as unstoppable chaos gremlins of some variety.
A take which finds its fullest expression, of course, in the plot of Archer’s Goon, but probably its purest depiction in The Time of the Ghost with Fenella, who is a world-uprooting feral force while also being a completely mundane human child somewhere between the ages of six and nine.
Ghost is the book Jones described as being closest to autobiographical of her works. (Which honestly explains so much about how she depicts adults.) And this fact has always mocked me with the distinct likelihood that somewhere in the world, when this book came out, there was a grown woman who had to look at her older sister’s body of work and reckon with this reflection of her child self refracted through it.
Conservatives will be like “Why are you holding me accountable for my bigoted beliefs? Whatever happened to tolerance???”
The response to that is Tolerance Is Not a Moral Precept - it is a peace treaty. It is a contract of cooperation, or at least, of non-interference.
the model of a peace treaty differs from the model of a moral precept in
one simple way: the protection of a peace treaty only extends to those
willing to abide by its terms. It is an agreement to live in peace, not an agreement to be peaceful no matter the conduct of others. A peace treaty is not a suicide pact.
(Bold added)
Someone who’s actively trying to oppress, belittle, exclude, or harm people based on their identities is not complying with the contract, so there’s no reason to extend its protection to them.
Thanks to the NDP and MP Heather McPherson, student loan repayments have been paused until May 31st, 2021.
Don’t forget this in the next election. The NDP has been the only party who has done anything for students in this Parliament and they keep pushing for help every month.
Victorians really went hard for their disease names. Like, during the winter I call up my therapist and go “I’m depressed again, Betsy.” and it sounds like I’m an underperforming economy that CNN reports on in a sexless empty fashion with blinking sterile charts in the background.
But if I went to my neighborhood priest in 1896 and was like “I’ve fought with the little black dog again this month and lost. I can no longer write.” That kinda fucks. These melodramatic hos knew how to phrase things.
People throughout history and across countries who suffer from mental illness: Get these damn animals out of my head!
Don't give up. Unless you have to for a little while. Then don't panic. CONTAINS: Star Trek, Dungeons and Dragons, Critical Role, History, Current Affairs, Space, Cats, and Etc. Adult.
