Quote of the day: "God, we love your money. We love it. LOVE IT! PRECIOUS! BRING ME THE PRECIOUS! KILLS THE WRITERSES! I— Oh, WOW. Sorry, America. It’s been a weird few weeks. Moving on...."
Italian writers threaten to strike
TV scribe Andrea Purgatori, who is the screenwriters’ rep within Italian artistic copyright association SIAE, is sounding a call to action, lamenting a lack of royalties pertaining to Italian film and TV drama product sold for web and mobile phone use.La Scala workers on strike
Purgatori said SIAE has taken legal action against mobile phone operators Telecom Italia, Vodafone, Wind and Hutchinson 3G, warning them to stop use of movies and TV dramas as content for their clients unless they are prepared to pay out specific royalty fees to writers.
“We’ve been talking a lot about it, and we will strike if we don’t get adequate compensation,” Purgatori said in an interview on Friday with weekly L’Espresso.
Meanwhile, SIAE is busy negotiating residuals for writers with Rupert Murdoch-owned paybox Sky Italia, which in past months has sold off plenty of mobile phone and web rights for Italian product to several Italian telecoms.
SIAE has given Sky Italia a Dec. 31 deadline. Unless an agreement is reached by then, starting in January 2008 Italy's artistic copyright org said it will consider illegal all further use of film and drama sold by Sky Italia for new media use.
A strike by La Scala's 800 workers forced the opera house on Thursday to cancel a second performance of Verdi's "Requiem" led by principal visiting conductor Daniel Barenboim. "Requiem" was to have been performed Saturday in Parma to help commemorate the 50th anniversary of Arturo Toscanini's death.International day of writers guilds' solidarity with the WGA: Nov. 28
Officials also canceled Saturday's performance of Mozart's "Cosi fan tutte" in Milan.
...La Scala's employees -- including the orchestra and choir -- say they have not had a pay raise in seven years. Managers say they cannot negotiate with employees unless there are national contract talks in the sector.
The International Affiliation of Writers Guilds has called for an international day of solidarity to show support for the Writers Guild of America strike.
The group, which represents 21,000 screenwriters in guilds worldwide, made the announcement Thursday, the closing day of its annual meeting in Montreal.
The solidarity day is set for Nov. 28 and writers will demonstrate in Australia, Ireland, New Zealand, Canada, the U.K., Mexico and France.
"The future of our industry is shifting toward new media," said Katharine Way, chair of the Writers Guild of Great Britain. "Writers have always had to fight for a small share of the revenues generated from their work and this case is no different."
Added Audrey O'Reilly, chair of the Irish Playwrights and Screenwriters Guild: "Our solidarity means that no self-respecting screenwriter in any country will undermine the U.S. strike. The overwhelming majority of our members will never take work from striking American colleagues because the fight now taking place in the U.S. is a fight for screenwriters across the globe."
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