Re: "paid me nothing"poor_medeaMarch 21 2023, 13:49:25 UTC
Which was a HUGE amount of money for rights to a self-help book/non fiction work in 2000, or whatever. My mother is an author, and when her books were optioned in the 90s, she was considered to have done VERY well to get 15k.
When you don't write in a back-end deal into the contract, the whole point is that you get paid the same whether the property does well or not.
Oh hon, anyone who's watched 2 minutes of Judge Judy knows you can't just decide "I don't like my contract because I failed to read it / or run it by a lawyer beforehand."
I just learned this genesis of her book inspiring TF like two weeks ago, and tbh, at the time, not knowing this, I asked myself “did she really need to buy the book rights and credit her?”
The parts TF was inspired by are not creations of this woman’s work, they are present in almost every teen’s contemporary middle school and high school experience. But I’m also really bad about setting my moral compass around copyright law since whenever I sit down and drill into it to try to think through what I truly believe it always ends with me feeling like it’s all stupid and any attempt to make sound rules is trying to codify the stupidest parts of capitalism but doing so with altruism which always fails for me.
Honestly, she probably didn’t *need* to and was actually doing right by this woman by acknowledging she was inspired by this book and bought the rights.
I mean if the movie is based on a non-fiction book but all of the characters and stories are fictional, how's that the same exactly? It's not like she plagiarized her story/book. It was just inspired.
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lol
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When you don't write in a back-end deal into the contract, the whole point is that you get paid the same whether the property does well or not.
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Literally! Look, talk to your agent if you didn't get a producer credit or an adaptation gig. That isn't on Tina Fey.
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Put that on a T-Shirt.
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The parts TF was inspired by are not creations of this woman’s work, they are present in almost every teen’s contemporary middle school and high school experience. But I’m also really bad about setting my moral compass around copyright law since whenever I sit down and drill into it to try to think through what I truly believe it always ends with me feeling like it’s all stupid and any attempt to make sound rules is trying to codify the stupidest parts of capitalism but doing so with altruism which always fails for me.
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