The Screen Lawyer Podcast Returns for Season 2 #201

Welcome to Season Two of The Screen Lawyer Podcast! In this episode, your host Pete Salsich takes you on a journey through the highlights of Season One while offering an exciting glimpse into what's to come in Season Two.

Get ready to dive into the legal intricacies of the entertainment industry as we tackle a wide range of topics. From ongoing legal battles to the fascinating world of AI Large Language Model training, we'll be exploring the cutting-edge issues that shape the screen legal and business landscape.

Tune in every other Wednesday as we embark on another season of The Screen Lawyer Podcast, navigating the ever-evolving intersection of law and entertainment. Don't miss out on the latest updates and expert insights—subscribe now!

Original Theme Song composed by Brent Johnson of Coolfire Studios.
Podcast sponsored by Capes Sokol.

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Transcript

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On this episode of the Screen Lawyer podcast, we're going to kick off season two of the podcast. We're going to highlight and recap some of the excellent moments from season one, some of the issues that we started covering that we're going to cover going forward this coming season and highlight some key guests and the topics to watch going forward. Pretty interesting stuff. It's going to be a great season and we're starting right now. Hey there. Welcome to the Screen Lawyer podcast. I'm your host. Pete's also the screen lawyer, and this is season two of the podcast. I think that's kind of cool to say I'm having fun with it. I hope you do too. We started the podcast last year, season one, and really learned a lot. I hope you followed us and enjoyed it. We got through a number of really cool legal issues, highlighted some of the things challenging in the entertainment intellectual property world. Basically, you know, what we do here on the screen, on our podcast is we talk about how things get on to the screen and what are the legal issues, contractual challenges and personal, you know, success stories, whatever that, that help things get on to a screen where we all pretty much consume our entertainment. We do our business, we look to the future, we celebrate the past. We do all of that pretty much on screens these days. And we're trying here to cover that as much as possible. Season one was was cool, I think, for a number of reasons, or at least for me. And part of that was we did kind of a mix of some episodes where we'd be digging into legal issues if you went back and so you could find the episode we did on the Writers Guild and the writers strike and how the ultimate end of that strike resulted in a new agreement that really addressed the AI elephant in the room, so to speak, in a way that recognized, I think, the fact that human authorship, human creativity has to be valued. There's some strong copyright overtones that really drove that decision with the writers in particular, because the very nature of their services is entirely protected by copyright law. And the Copyright Office is very clear to say that if there was too much AI and not enough human authorship, there would be no copyright protection in the work. And that could have seriously undermined copyright ownership in finished films. I think that went a long way to everybody recognizing we've got to deal with this issue. The actors settled their strike later in the year. We haven't had a chance to dig in too closely there, but we will. But they also addressed AI little bit different issues involved, but they made an attempt to deal with this new reality that really wasn't present the last time these contracts were negotiated three years earlier. So those were interesting things to dig into. And we're going to track those things going forward because we're really just beginning to operate under the new contracts to see how those things work out. We also dug in a little bit to the in Missouri here, reenacting film tax credits, tax incentive program, the Missouri Motion media tax credit that came into existence was legislation was passed last year, finally went into the program operating in late in the fall. Saint Louis already saw its first film come in and take advantage of that, the movie On Fire, which is going to be really exciting when that comes out next year, but there's a lot else going on and we spent some time digging in on that and we will follow up on that as well. Another topic we covered was the Corporate Transparency Act. The CTA, a major new statute that went into action operation January 1st of this year just a few weeks ago. And it's actually applies an entirely new regime of reporting beneficial ownership information about literally virtually every company in the country, unless you're already heavily regulated or publicly traded. So it's going to impact every single LLC that gets formed for an independent film project, Every production company, all of those companies are going to deal with that. And that was one of the issues that we covered from a legal basis, and we'll pay attention to that going forward, too. You know, another thing that I maybe the most fun, though, about season one was getting to have some really interesting guests. You know, we had you know, we're here in Saint Louis, we're broadcasting from Saint Louis, even though we do work all over the country and even in other parts of the world, we're based here. And we were able to highlight some of the really cool things happening in the production screen world here in Saint Louis. We had our guests included Jeff Keane and Steve Luebbert from Cool Fire Studios, a company that's been producing things for screens for more than 20 years here in town, really talking about different aspects of their business from the overall business side to the development side, how they look for new projects. That was a lot of fun. My partner Gary Pierson has appeared on here, the music lawyer and will, I know we'll see Gary again as both a guest and probably a guest host this season talking about more issues that particularly as they deal with music, getting on the screen, happening more and more and more in interesting ways. That's being addressed even though the law hasn't changed. So, you know, one of the themes that came up both with our guests and just items we cover is how technology, creativity, you know, the production world is always moving faster than the law, but copyright law governs every second of footage that ends up on a screen. And so we have to figure out how to manage those two sometimes competing interests. Right. And other understand that while the technology is moving this way, A.I. or different ways or things are getting on screen, new distribution models, social media platforms, etc., where things live on screens, but the basic rules about content and copyright ownership and music licensing haven't changed. The industry is trying to deal with those before the courts do, and that's always interesting to follow and we'll continue to pay attention to that. We had local filmmakers, Saint Louis filmmaker Meg Halski was a guest towards the end of the season. Fascinating episode, talking about her journey from commercial production into essentially creating her own worldbuilding with her own projects that she's writing and the effort, the process of getting those things to Hollywood, which is ongoing. We'll follow her journey as well. We had Ron Watermon from Story Smart talk about fascinating episode, talking about his journey from working in the legislature through long time marketing with the Saint Louis Cardinals baseball team into his own business. Now telling, you know, getting professional storytellers around the country to help other people tell their stories on screen. Really cool business model. Ron was a great guest. You know, one of the cool things we did, we did it a couple of times last season, but the first time we did, we went on location and we went out to Jaime French's studio. YouTube sensation, creator, writer, comedian and singer of just... Jaime is a fantastic watch on screen. And she invited us out into her studio to go out and record on set there. That was a really cool experience to sort of be on set, if you will, on location. Chris Hayes, our producer, was out there with me and we had a blast. It was an interesting challenge. We learned how to do it. We may do more of that this coming season as well. And then we also had some really cool guests from out of town, a couple from L.A., actually, who joined us via Zoom. We're going to do a more of that. We're going expand our guest range this season to reach all over the country, to talk to people who are putting things on screens and playing cool roles. But we were fortunate in season one to have a visit from Mitch Jackson, Los Angeles based trial attorney extraordinaire, but who also probably is equally well known, or even more so as one of the true leaders, thought leaders and practition leaders of use of streaming social media, A.I., the Metaverse is not only to deliver messaging, but also to deliver really top level legal services. Mitch is absolutely somebody to follow and pay attention. And it was a real pleasure to have him as a guest. And then towards the end of the year, we were joined by a St Louisan, but really an LA big time Hollywood producer, Michael Beugg. Michael spent a long time with us talking through what it's like to be a producer, the different aspects of that role from Hollywood, but also kind of how he got started, his experiences bringing films to St Louis and on location elsewhere. And he was a fantastic guest. He's another really important person to watch. And, you know, speaking of works that Michael did, he's one of the executive producers on The Color Purple, the musical that was released on Christmas Day. And my wife and I actually saw it on New Year's Day. It was awesome. So I highly recommend that film and any of Michael's work. And we were really fortunate to have them as guests. So and one of the things that we learn in observing sort of the early operation of the tax credit program here in Missouri and just talking more and more to people involved is how critically important the role of the producer is. And that may sound kind of obvious if you think about Hollywood movies and Michael Beugg talked about that on the podcast. How, you know, his job is to put together, with other people, but to put the deal together, so to speak, to marry the script and the director and the potential locations and the actors and the budget and the audience and see how all of these things fit together. If they do fit together and put them together in such a way that the film can be produced on budget, realize the director's dream, highlight the art of every one of the departments in the production, and then hopefully make money in return for the studios and their investors. Very interesting and well-established role for the big time films. But in the independent film world, I think that's something that there is a real growth opportunity to take on that role in. For the emerging filmmaker. And we're going to cover that particularly because if, you know, a lot of filmmakers that are truly sort of guerilla filmmakers, if you will, have some money, shoot some footage, get some more money, shoot some more footage, put the film together like that. Highly creative can be really cool output, but that process will never get you the kind of financing that the tax credit program enables because you can't count any money you've spent before you get your tax credit approval letter. We'll spend some time digging into how that process works in future episodes, but it's something that we want to watch closely going forward. And if you're interested in the independent film world and how these budgets get put together, keep an eye out for that topic as we'll get into it. And, you know, and I mentioned AI fair use. This is another one of those areas we want to dig into more deeply right before the end of the year. The New York Times added it's named to the growing list of plaintiffs who have filed lawsuits against OPENAI, based on the ChatGPT large language model, a method of absorbing thousands, hundreds of thousands of copyrighted works in order to train the ChatGPT and just generative AI models in general. This whole process and we talked about it in the context of the lawsuit brought by Sarah Silverman and other authors, and the fact that this is largely, I think, going to tee up as a fair use issue. I don't think there's really any dispute that copyrighted works are being accessed without permission. The question is, is does that still fall under fair use and therefore be okay without a license? Interesting issues there. And in some respects, the New York Times lawsuit is essentially the same lawsuit, but they're making a different argument. We've spent some time in the past talking about how fair use has four factors, one of two to consider to see whether something is fair use or not. Well, one of those factors is really about the economic impact on the original. So, you know, one of the questions that you ask in a fair use analysis is does the new work negatively impact the market for the original? And sometimes that's very easy to answer. Often it's maybe not that important, although it was a pretty important part of the analysis that the Supreme Court used last summer in the Andy Warhol Prince case. But what The New York Times is really arguing is that if this is allowed to be fair use Openai is essentially able to replace the news media because of the nature of the works that the news media produces. The OpenAI can literally spit the same news out, and that's their argument. So it's a different it's a different weighting, I think, of that particular factor in the fair use analysis. It'll be interesting to see if that is really a different argument or whether some of these things all kind of get consolidated. I don't know if we'll get any kind of a court ruling in 2024. I think we'll certainly see motion practice on this as more and we'll see those arguments develop. But we're going to be watching that one closely, both in this season and probably for a long time to come. And then lastly, you know, one of my favorite parts of each episode last season and that we will continue going forward is What's On Your Screen. And you know, we've talked we tee that up with each guest because, you know, as I said earlier, basically we all live on our screens now. We consume product on there. We watch content at the end of the day or during the middle of the day or while we're working, we put our work out on the screens, we spend time on our laptops. We literally on our on our screens all the time. And I think it's fascinating to ask different people at different points in time when they get the question, what's on your screen, What comes to mind first? You know, sometimes it's a show they're watching. Other times it's people who are doing work. It was really interesting to ask different guests that question because sometimes they would go deeply into what they're working on at the moment. Other times they would fall back on, you know, give me good ideas for shows to watch. So that's going to continue. And in that vein, I'll tell you right now what's been on my screen over the holidays. You know, it's one of those times where if you're anything like me, you get maybe a little bit more time to relax or spend time with family. It's been really cold here in the Midwest. Burning a fire in a fireplace almost every single night. And sitting down at the end of the day and watching New shows and two things that have been on my screen recently that I'm going to share with you are both series streaming series that just got started this year. So one is Death and Other Details. It's on Hulu. Just watch the first two episodes last night, it just dropped a week or so ago. Mandy Patinkin, Violett Beane lead the way. It's a it's one of these sort of you know, this time there's a murder on a cruise and you've got to a finite group of people and a detective who follows it. So in some ways it's trying to cash in on knives out and other things like that. But it's set up a little bit differently. I found it to be really interesting. I'll be curious to continue to see where it goes, but that's on my screen and another show that is sort of demonstrates sort of my interests is a Netflix show called Bodies that was also recently released. I'm about five episodes in and out of eight, and this is basically the same sort of the same murder victim discovered in the same spot in London in four different eras from 1890s, 1940s, 2023 and 2050. And each time it's essentially the same murder, but a different detective. And it turns out time travel is real and all this other cool stuff that kind of geeks me out. I’ve always thought time travel is fascinating. And when it's well done, I have a lot of fun with it. So Bodies on Netflix is on my screen. Do you like those shows? Check them out. So that's kind of a little highlight. That's where we've been. This is where we're going. I look forward to we're going to have lots of guests coming forward. We will let you know as those things come forward. But I hope that you will join us each and every episode. And we're going to continue to drop our episodes every other Wednesday throughout 2024. We might drop in from time to time with an extra if circumstances warrant, but definitely look for us every other Wednesday you'll be able to catch our podcast. If you're an audio podcast person, wherever you find your podcast, we're on all the platforms and if you're a YouTube person, you can watch our YouTube channel at the screen lawyer icon and like and subscribe. So you'll get more of our content. We do have some additional non podcast related video series that we're planning for the screen lawyer YouTube channel. So keep an eye out for those. And in general, just if you have comments, if there are things you'd like to see, if you want to share what's on your screen, let us know in the comments section. One more thing. I got to say thank you to the crew here at the Screen Lawyer podcast. My producer, Chris Hayes, my other producer, Andy Hawkins, the two of them here make this possible. It does not exist without them. And I just want to make sure you know them. If you if you know them in person, thank them. If you don't know, see if you can find them. They're pretty awesome people. So that's where we are now. Take care. We'll see you soon and keep watching The Screen. Lawyer.