Scabscripts

Scabscripts Wiki

Today, Sony TV put many series regulars on unpaid hiatus. Yesterday, Universal Media Studios invoked its "force majeure" clause, thus suspending many of its series regulars. As early as Monday, studios may invoke "force majeure" in order to dissolve deals with their writers. And this week, Warner Bros TV circulated a memo announcing that all of its series could go dark in coming weeks.

The robust, rapid, and high-quality content development uniquely associated with wikis could enable timely creation of viable scripts for popular shows including "The Office", "Law & Order", "Psych", "Monk", "'Til Death", etc.

Even if none of the scripts can be used, their rapid development (of hopefully equal quality) ought to serve the broader purpose of hastening a resolution to the strike, which will hopefully help save some of these shows from lasting damage to their viewer bases.

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Additional info on the production status of the major studios is available here.

This is an intriguing notion, but I don't think it is possible for it to work in the way that you envision. We enjoy fan fiction efforts, so if you just want a place where fans can create scripts together for their own enjoyment, we'd be happy to do that.

However, scripts created here are very unlikely to be picked up by the major studios for several reasons:

• Copyright and/or trademark issues -- some studios are very touchy about efforts involving their characters which were produced without prior contractual agreement.
• Licensing issues -- by submitting text to Wikia, users agree for it to be licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License, which allows others to freely use and copy the text. This is very important to our mission to spread free knowledge, but studios are not likely to be willing to take on text with these licensing complications.
• Plagiarism issues -- many show creators are banned by their contracts from even reading unsolicited/fan manuscripts, because it opens the door for potential lawsuits. I know that some writers/producers who like to interact with fans on message boards or mailing lists had to put a "no fanfic" rule in place on those forums because of this.
  • For example, a fan creates their own "Law & Order" script containing, say, a murderous life insurance agent, and sends it to the show's creative team. The studios fear that if any time after that an episode appears with an insurance agent as the killer, and is even remotely similar to the fan script, the fan could sue for plagiarism/copyright infringement/a piece of the action. This fear is only going to be worse for the studios if the ideas are submitted anonymously or pseudonymously on a public website.

Please let me know if you'd like to change the proposal's scope. Thanks! — Catherine (talk) 22:40, 19 November 2007 (UTC)