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Author: Nic

Introducing Revenue Sharing Language – a Web Monetization answer to Hollywood accounting?

Scarlett Johansson’s recent contract dispute with Disney and their thunderbolt response that she had ‘callous disregard for the suffering of the pandemic’ showed Hollywood’s power players on the brink of civil war. The LA Times suggested the fight, and Disney’s diss at Marvel’s biggest female star, was really about a bigger question: “how should stars and filmmakers be paid for movies and TV shows now that the business model is shifting quickly from one based on box office and television ratings to one reliant on online subscriptions?”. It’s easy to calculate how to earn a cut of ticket or DVD sales for a film, but what about ‘all you can eat’ flat-fee subscription video services where some people watch one film a month – and others dozens a week?

To those in the Web Monetization (WM) community, the answer is maybe simple – they could get a share of every second that a subscriber is watching for. A Coil.com plugin in the subscriber’s browser, streams $0.36/hour to the website’s Payment Pointer for the first 12 hours each month, and tapers off after that. Amazon Prime also pays filmmakers per seconds viewed, tho at a much lower and well-guarded, rate. Problem solved? Web Monetization could turn subscription income into profit-share for every second viewed of any film that works for all but the biggest platform users.

However, a Payment Pointer only points to one wallet, in reality, the premiere of Scarlet Widow 2: Implausible Resurrection on Cinnamon in 2024 would want to pay out to many different wallets: the website, the production company, Marvel and all the stars guaranteed a share of the profits.

Sharing Web Monetization payouts precisely

Probabilistic Revenue Sharing is WM’s answer to this, which works by letting the hosting website list a number of payment pointers and a value for what percent of visits each pointer should be the receiving wallet for. If it’s 50% Disney and 50% Scarlett; every other view of the page would load each payment pointer, so the amount paid out should be largely equal after a few hundred views. But for videos with a dozen or more payees, or feature films with 120 minutes per view and only a few dozen views, it’s easy to imagine how quickly probabilistic payouts become less than precise.

In our Grant for the Web project, MOVA we’re taking another approach – with a CiviCRM tool to log into the wallet behind a payment pointer, check the balance, then distribute payments to multiple parties depending on a set of pre-agreed rules. This opens up the possibility of more creative repayment structures that take account other obligations – like paying back the drone hire company for your shoot and the cinematographer’s deferred fee, then the loan from your rich great-aunt, before splitting what’s left fairly between the production cast and crew. And how much easier might it be to get that rich great-aunt’s loan if she doesn’t have to depend on her nephew’s accounting skills to get repaid?

Once we started exploring the tool we hit a question: how can payees be sure that they are receiving the right amount? Even ignoring fraud, how could the system check that payouts are accurate? Could there be a machine- and human- readable version of the revenue split that could be hashed/printed out and also used as the basis for payouts? This idea of a human and machine readable agreement is sometimes known as a Ricardian contract. This would have the benefit of letting us develop something that other systems could read and produce; using, like Web Monetization, Interledger and Payment Pointers, a decentralised approach. Researching the space it soon appeared that while there is a sophisticated machine readable rights language – Open Digital Rights Language; and there are multiple systems for writing up contracts with machine readable syntax, including Smart Contract templates, and the Accord Project, we’ve not found a syntax for revenue sharing agreements.

Introducing RSL

Revenue-Sharing Language (github.com/openvideotech/rsl) is a proposed YAML-based vocabulary and syntax to describe how revenues received at a wallet, pointer or account should be distributed. It uses YAML to make it easier for non-developers to read, with agreements structured as a series of steps. MOVA’s revenue-sharing-agreement builder will output this syntax, which will then be used as the basis for payment distributions on an ongoing basis by the CiviCRM extension we’re building.

Each step in an RSL agreement pays out either fixed amounts or a percentage split – before flowing onto the next step. Steps could have one payee or hundreds; and each payee can be identified with an ILP payment pointer (or a bank account, wallet address or other payee address). RSL isn’t intended to generate or implement the agreements – that’s the next task in our project – but rather to provide an open serialisable basis for structuring them.

In the spec for RSL – which we are inviting comments and feedback on – we have six examples of different kinds of payout structures. For instance, the below YAML maps a traditional publishing advance deal where a writer gets 25% of royalties, of which 10% goes to their agent, after they’ve repaid their advance to the publisher in the first step.

---
name: "Best of times, Worst of times"
description: "Book deal for the new novel by Charlene Dickens"
pointer: ilp.uphold.com/191320x91
currency: EUR
steps:
  -
    type: fixed
    payee:
      - ["PRNG House", $ilp.example.com/prng, ilp, 40000]
  -
    type: percent
    payee: 
      - ["Charlene Dickens", 12345678/12-34-56, uk-ac, 22.5 ]
      - ["Internet Aritsts Management", payment@example.com, paypal, 2.5]
      - ["PRNG House", $ilp.example.com, ilp, dbse, 75 ]

Of course these agreements could get very complex and RSL probably wouldn’t be able to accommodate sophisticated, high-end royalty agreements. Gerard Butler’s contract payout dispute over Olympus has Fallen, for example, appeared a few days after Johansson’s and “entitled him to 10% of net profits, plus 6% of domestic adjusted gross receipts above $70 million and 12% of foreign adjusted gross receipts above $35 million… [plus] 5% of net profits” to his production company and “certain bonuses for hitting box office thresholds”.

Hollywood accounting

Once we look at LaLa Land salaries and bonuses it may feel a little abstract – a company making billions in profits on one side and a star earning more per movie than any YouTube influencer will probably make in their lifetime. But Butler and Johansson are the tip of the iceberg of ‘Hollywood accounting’ long famed for finding creative ways to ensure that, for instance, Return of the Jedi, Spiderman, Batman and Harry Potter: Order of the Phoenix are all technically loss-making —despite huge commercial success— so never have to pay out profit shares to their cast and crew.

And many contract payment disputes outside of Hollywood involve regular creators who’ve hit it big. Consider Nomcebo Zikode, the singer of last year’s lockdown hit Jerusalema (440 million views on youTube for the original so far, and countless views for the tribute dances) and who claims to still have not been paid one cent because of a contract dispute with DJ Master KG who she made it with. KG counters that the issue is Zikode wanting a 70-30 split, not the 50-50 he claims they agreed. The lack of a documented agreement Zikode and KG can reference leaves it potentially down to whoever can afford the better lawyer. This is a sad outcome for a song that gave cheer to many millions of people during lockdown both listening and dancing to it.

Fenomenos do Semba, uncredited choreographers of 2020’s viral hit Jerusalema

The TikTok Dance Strike – credit… and payment?

Dance mashups brings up another question – that of unpaid and often uncredited choreographers of viral hits. For example Fenomenos do Semba – the Angolan dancers whose original eating-while-dancing choreography for Jerusalema doubtless helped the hit, and made it easy for others to copy the dance and make the countless remix videos.

This subject got attention this summer after a Jimmy Fallon segment where Addison Rae danced viral TikTok dances without crediting the choreographers. While Mya Johnson, the 15-year-old whose choreography to Cardi B’s Up was performed on the show was gracious, this lack of due props drove this summer’s Black TikTok Dance strike.

Attribution will doubtless improve (the Tonight Show and Rae both had to respond to the backlash) – but what if a hit songs’ revenues could be shared with choreographers whose work goes viral?

In RSL we have proposed a ‘Variable Syntax’ which would allow making agreements with people who aren’t known at the time the agreement is made. It was designed so that a filmmaker could share their Monetization income with a website or influencer who hosts their film, but it could maybe also work with future choreographers whose routines help a song go viral. Given the complexity of making that work accurately and securely, we aren’t currebuilding out Variable Syntax during this round of work within MOVA, but it’s included in RSL as it seems interesting – and as an open language maybe others will try to implement it.

So I’m very pleased to share RSL for feedback, criticism and review. It’s been created with much helpful input from readers including Mark Boas, Laurian Gridinoc, Rich Lott, Aidan Saunders, Silvia Schmidt and Kevin Wittek — many thanks to them – and also Adam Davies, for helping inspire this tool, following the years of manually calculating royalty payouts for our Film Finance Handbook.

What would a video Wikipedia look like?

I hope you forgive the clickbait headline, reader, as our project isn’t a video Wikipedia. But the subject is a good thought experiment to introduce some of the motivations around ‘open video’, and explain some of the backstory to our project MOVA (Monetizing Open Video Assets), which has just started this week.

‘Video Wikipedia’ is a long-discussed concept that slams fast and hard into technical, social and funding questions: what is the interface for collaborative and transparent video editing that’s as easy to use as a Wiki? How would you host and serve that much video? How could you moderate for quality, accuracy and legality of media? How would such a project be funded? What might motivate videomakers to contribute?

While Web Monetization may offer answers to the funding question, the scale of the other challenges, not to mention the carbon footprint of video online versus text, triggers an immediate question – why does the planet need a video wikipedia? Simply literacy: for the 773 million adults around the world who cannot read, two-thirds of whom are women, Wikipedia is useless – and that’s before considering many people’s low reading skills or learning styles. According to Wikimedia Sweden, a quarter of Wikipedia users prefer or need text in a spoken form. For as long as Wikipedia can’t serve these people’s needs, YouTube will – yet without an editorial process to ensure quality, accuracy or ‘neutral point of view’.

Pratik Shetty, the co-founder of the most recent attempt to solve the problem, VideoWiki, was inspired after seeing the presence of mosquitoes near his building and warning the building’s security guard they could cause dengue fever. The guard reassured him that he could treat dengue by himself without visiting a doctor, showing a YouTube video that listed five at-home remedies. When Pratik advised him to get his medical advice from Wikipedia not YouTube, the guard explained he cannot read.

VideoWiki Founders(L:R) Pratik Shetty, Hassan Amin

Shetty and Hassan Amin’s VideoWiki isn’t the first attempt to solve the problem; the subject has a long history – WikiTV dates back to 2005, and in 2008 open source collaborative video editor Kaltura added a MediaWiki extension and announced a partnership with Wikimedia to bring rich media to pages. But it struggled to take off, and the VideoWiki lists under 150 articles articles made into rich, editable media. As Wikipedia itself says, the incorporation of video into wikipedia is still at ‘a very early stage’ and although there are 135,000 videos listed on WikiMedia Commons many seem likely to have been generated by the Open Access Media Importer project, a bot which imports public access scientific video from PubMed Central.

As I left the FOSDEM Videowiki session in Brussels in February 2020, I found myself wondering why there wasn’t more open video on Wikipedia. Part of the answer is simple: money. It’s far cheaper to write a Wikipedia entry or share a photo than produce a professional-quality video. Furthermore, Wikimedia’s Creative Commons licensing doesn’t allow for non-commercial, so filmmakers wanting to still sell their film to Netflix can’t also share parts of it to Wikipedia without allowing someone else to then sell a version of it to Amazon.

As it happened I’d just that day filmed an interview with the co-founder and former ‘Benevolent Dictator’ of CiviCRM, Donald Lobo for an ongoing, somewhat neglected project of mine, making Creative Commons SA video around the CiviCRM community: screen.is/civicrm/. It had struck me that Lobo’s interview would be interesting to people outside of CiviCRM as well: he was employee number five at Yahoo; and thru his Chintu Gudiya Foundation is involved in a range of transformational open source development projects in India. I’d been lucky to get the interview at short notice, so what gave me the right to exclusively own a 30 minute interivew, for the two minutes that might make its way into a final film of mine?

Interview with Donald Lobo

At another FOSDEM session on Wikibase, I learned of JSTOR’s Interview Archive for Peter Kunhardt’s HBO film about Martin Luther King’s last three years: King in the Wilderness (pictured top). The film is a historical document, but so are the uncut testimonies of each of the interviewees. JSTOR labs created a searchable database of each interview for the documentary, complete with transcripts, tagging, metadata and background information from Wikipedia. https://www.youtube.com/embed/MutfvpFS6G0

JSTOR’s Ron Snyder talking thru the project explained how ‘some of the best stuff ended up on the cutting room floor’. This is something I’ve mentioned before here and is well known to filmmakers but not necessarily viewers — just how much footage is never shared in order to make a tight and snappy final cut. Peter Kunhardt’s Film Foundation, has since put the interview archives of more documentaries online but not with the JSTOR interface and it’s not caught on further.

These three takeaways from my weekend in Brussels at FOSDEM were whirring around my mind as I got on the train back to London:

  • Wikimedia doesn’t have enough good quality Creative Commons BY/SA licensed video;
  • Documentary filmmakers effectively bin millions of hours of footage that never makes their final cut each year;
  • For some cultural projects the full unedited video provides value and importance as a source text. If you’re lucky as a filmmaker to interview a historically or socially significant figure – is there a responsibility to share their uncut story? It also can add context at a time when the stripping of context on social media is, in the words of Charlie Warzel, creating a ‘one-dimensional space’ for culture.

After the Grant for the Web first call was announced and I started testing Web Monetization, came an ‘aha moment’. What if the potential for Web Monetization income could encourage filmmakers to open up more of their assets? More open assets could mean, eventually, better video on Wikimedia and more interesting works using those assets. Perhaps it can even share monetization between orginators and remixers, as Mark Boas has discussed with Hyperaudio.

Over two GftW application processes, the seed of an idea germinated into project MOVA, which I’m really excited to finally getting going on – with a great team and perhaps the most exciting technology – in Web Monetization – I’ve seen in 21 years thinking about filmmaking on the web. In the coming months I’ll dive deeper into what we’re building, and the surrounding questions around video rights, discovery, moderation and sustainability, but for now – hello – I’m really looking forward to this journey.