What about a sign that simply says “Everyone is welcome here”, would that be acceptable to you?

Now you’re the one making ill-fitting analogies. Aaron Paul doesn’t have to do any addition labour each time someone watches Breaking Bad. He’s not required to be in the barn, it’s just got an image of him painted on one wall.

To over-extend the analogy further; if I build a barn and the farmer agrees to pay me $X for each cow living it, what should happen if he starts storing wheat in it instead? I signed a bad contract, but it’s still the terms I agreed to. I’m not automatically entitled to go back and change them.

I fully support the workers protesting for whatever form of payment they want. There’s no reason why streaming services shouldn’t pay residuals if that’s what the workers want.

That doesn’t mean they’re entitled to additional compensation for labour they’ve already done. If they did the work for an agreed price that wasn’t linked to the future profits then they shouldn’t complain just because the future profits are greater than expected. Equally if you take your compensation as a share of the future profits, you can’t complain if they’re lower than expected.

The grey area in all this is when contracts have been badly worded and the rights holders are trying to use these loopholes unfairly. If someone negotiated to be paid $X every time an episode is aired, it creates a big problem with the rise of non-broadcast TV. It’s not realistic to claim that a show is ‘aired’ every time a single person streams it, but equally it’s not fair say they aren’t being aired at all just because they’re streaming on demand instead.

I don’t know what the best solution is. Future contracts will certainly be worded with streaming mind, but what (if anything) should be done about previous contracts is a much more difficult issue.

Am I not allowed to ask questions as part of my investigations?

I personally work in two creative fields (photography and software design) and in neither case are royalties a normal thing. If I take photographs of your new product so you can advertise it or build a website to help you sell it then I’m paid for the job I do, not based on the amount of money you make afterwards. The full value of my creations cannot be determined until years afterwards, but that doesn’t change anything.

The value of labour is not always dependent on the value of the finished product. If it was then a truck driver hauling a load of computer parts would be paid hundreds of times more than one hauling grain.

There is nothing wrong with choosing to be paid royalties, but there isn’t an automatic entitlement to them on moral grounds. Choosing to sell your labour or creative works for a fixed fee is a perfectly valid option, but if you do you shouldn’t complain when the farmer starts using the barn as a restaurant and starts making ten times more money from it

Why should he be earning anything from it at this point anyway? If I’m paid to build a barn for a farmer, I’m not entitled to a percentage of the farmers profits every year he uses the barn. It’s his barn, I just worked to create it. If I’m the camera guy on a movie, I don’t get residuals for years afterwards. I get paid for my labour and then move on to the next job.

Aaron Paul did a stellar job playing Jessie in Breaking Bad, but why does that entitle him to rent every time the character is shown somewhere? He was already paid handsomely for his labour. Why should he be paid more when he’s no longer working on it?

What if you could have free healthcare without insurance or paying any more tax than you do at the moment? Because that’s what the article is claiming should be possible.

I installed Microsoft Office on your parents computer…

Word to your mother

$1.50 per year iirc. They posted a whole load of monthly stats with the annual user income mixed in amongst them so that it didn’t seem so bad.