The Mission and Projects of the Creators Federation

In Silent Spring, Rachel Carson wrote about the imperceptible destruction of the environment. She described the poisoning of the air, water and soil not as a dramatic, visible act marked one day when birds die in large masses or a stream turns undrinkable. Rather, she warned of the invisible, daily erosion of our bio-system that slowly but surely breaks apart the delicate balance we rely on for our survival.

In similar ways, creators—actors, screenwriters, songwriters, musicians, book authors, freelance journalists, photographers, illustrators, visual artists and fine artists—are facing enormous threats. The hundreds of thousands of people, who shape our culture and promote our understanding of life in all its facets, are undergoing a steady erosion of their livelihood. Their remuneration is declining, their meager benefits are evaporating and their rights are being taken away by large media companies. Indeed, individual creators, who are the true engine behind the industry that is so often lauded as the future of the economy, are struggling to survive.

Ironically, at the same time, creators have an opportunity to control the distribution and promotion of their work outside the traditional media structures. But, to take advantage of the opportunity brought on by vast technological changes, they will have to intensify their efforts to make sure their rights are not taken away by large media companies, understand the market landscape they face and have a unified voice in the public discussion over the information revolution.

The Creators Federation’s mission is revolutionary—to coordinate a long-term strategic campaign to maintain the economic viability of a grand cultural resource. The strategic goal: using the promise of the technological revolution, the Federation will increase the leverage of creators over market forces by developing coordinated campaigns that enhance creators’ control over their work, alter laws to better defend creators and educate individual creators so they can function more effectively in the commercial and non-profit marketplace.

The Creators Federation is forging a unified voice that articulates creators’ individual interests—as distinct from the interests of distributors of culture in the profit and non-profit world—in matters ranging from fair remuneration to tax policy to government funding. Today, such a voice does not exist and creators are left to rely on representatives such as the Association of American Publishers or Recording Industry Association of America, who cannot fully represent individual creators’ interests. The Federation will harness market forces that seek to dictate economic conditions to the cultural workers of our nation (by one estimate, 1.6 million people), weaken collective bargaining in an industry already beset by the dominating voices of media conglomerates and put the control of information in the hands of a few.

The idea of a Creators Federation raises a threshold question: why can’t existing creators’ organizations themselves achieve the Federation’s proposed goals? Many creators’ organizations are simply too occupied with their membership demands, making it difficult to step back and develop longer-term, creator-wide strategies—strategies that are essential to coping with the media industry of today and the future.

Creators are quite different from other workers. They do not have the inclination to develop a strategic power analysis because, by nature and work structure, they view their economic success, achieved usually by working alone, as a by-product of their personal talent—not as a result of a banding together of similarly-situated people who take advantage of a common strategic understanding of how to exercise power.

The Federation will not only be focusing power but giving birth to a new way of thinking, a new culture. In the past, creators saw their futures disconnected and their organizations danced around each other, oblivious of their common ground. Alone, they represent many kingdoms, small and large, all of whom can be chipped away at by the people who control creators’ working lives. Together, as some organizations have learned, they represent hundreds of thousands of cultural workers who can promote a powerful agenda—one that can be in harmony with and advance the public interest.


Why Now?
Two trends tell us that the time is right for a Creators Federation. First, everywhere one looks, the signs of the economic distress of creators are evident:

• Writers, illustrators and photographers are losing control, in perpetuity, to their copyrighted works. Unless the current trend is reversed, within five years, all copyrights will be held by large media conglomerates—contrary to the spirit of the Constitutional copyright protection that seeks to protect individual authors and the public’s access to information.

• Actors and screenwriters are battling to get a fair share of royalties from new media. In the Fall of 2000, actors went out on strike against the advertising industry in an effort to maintain the status quo and gain royalties for ads shown on the Internet. Though screen, radio and television writers eventually reached agreement with the industry, the pressure on creators will continue.

• Songwriters and musicians are demanding a fairer deal in their relationship with record companies. From the Future of Music Coalition to the Recording Artists Coalition to specific legal fights, songwriters and musicians are organizing to challenge and question long-standing industry practices.

Second, while the common threads between all creators have existed before, they are finally becoming obvious to the creators themselves who now work for the same corporate entities. The digital age has ignited a massive structural change and spawned a new industry, combining movie companies, publishing, radio, television, cable, telephone, consumer electronics and software into single or interlocking corporations. And, as a result, a strategy to safeguard creators can only succeed if it seeks to address the emerging corporate landscape, which defines the working conditions of creators. In other words, a unified strategy that focuses the collective energy of creators in a common direction.