The Role of Private Intellectual Property Rights in Markets for Labor and Ideas: Screen Credit and the Writers Guild of America, 1938-2000

Abstract

This history of screen credit and the Writers Guild of America focuses on the union’s administration of private intellectual property rights to facilitate the labor market for writers and the market for ideas, scripts, and treatments for film and TV. Screen credit is one of the very few forms of intellectual property in the modern economy that is designed by workers for workers and without the involvement of the corporations that control most intellectual property policy. Based on research in the archives of the Writers Guild not available to the public, this article argues that the Guild survived conditions that might lead to de-unionization because of the value it provides writers and employers in managing markets for labor and ideas. In particular, the Writers Guild administers two private intellectual property rights systems – the * Chancellor’s Professor of Law, University of California, Irvine. I am indebted to the staff of the Writers Guild of America, West, especially Anthony Segall, Lesley Mackey McCambridge, and Sally Burmester, for providing me access to their files and answering my questions. In order to protect the integrity of the credit determination system, I agreed to mention no names of people or projects referenced in the files. I’ve already benefitted from suggestions of Erwin Chemerinsky, Bob Ellickson, Jonathan Handel, Tony Reese, Bob Spoo, Matt Stahl, and participants at colloquia at UC Berkeley, Boston University, Georgetown University, the University of Tulsa, the University of Western Ontario, and Yale Law School. I am also grateful for research assistance from UC Irvine students Rachel Diggs, Xenia Tashlitsky, Christina Zabat-Fran, and the librarians at UC Irvine Law Library.