My pay went from $240k to $0
mstdn.social
mstdn.social
Of course, lawyers represent the single most powerful political bloc in the nation, so it's a tough road.
Not to say the problem is nonexistent in other countries, but American society minimizes laws (due to worries about government overreach) and hand-waives away concerns because either the legal system, or worse "the free market" will decide and make everything just.
It incentivizes a complete lack of individual ethics in any decision. "Is it legal? Then we should do it." is the only question being asked.
Not sure how you come to that conclusion. Here's just one example of the opposite - almost 30% of US workers need a government license just to do their job: https://isps.yale.edu/news/blog/2013/11/is-the-us-%E2%80%9Co...
Not sure that is true.
Moreover, contracts, legal threats, laws and liabilities are involved in most transactions, to a far higher extent than many other countries with more reasonable legal systems and laws.
The USA is renowned for being an exceptionally litigious society.
The USA is also known for its inequitable legal system where you can often win by spending more, and you can often lose just because you are poor.
Eminent domain, plea bargains, 3 strikes, harsh minimum sentences, cowboy cops, frivolous lawsuits, ridiculous liabilities, lock and forget, zero rehabilitation, two speed society, defunding, Civil Forfeiture, Bankruptcy, IP laws, etcetera. Even assuming you have minimised laws (I really don’t think that is the case), the emergent effects of your legal structures are perverse and damaging to the US as a whole.
The USA isn’t the worst in the world, but it is a long way from being good or fair.
Civil law though? You need a private army of lawyers.
Sounds like following the letter of the law, not minimizing it.
Such as the moral/ethical component, and so on.
An example of pro-consumer arbitration is the Tenancy Deposit Scheme in the UK. All tenancy deposits must be either stored with the UK-wide scheme, or at least insured by the scheme (at the landlord's expense). This is a non-governmental body, but use of it is mandated by legislation.
When it comes time to get your deposit back, if the landlord decides to keep some, the tenant can challenge that, and what happens is essentially just arbitration. It doesn't go to court, it's decided by the TDS.
The benefits are that the whole process is designed around deposit resolution, so it's much more streamlined than going to court. Also it doesn't require any outlay by either side to initiate a challenge, so it's effectively free. Both of these are much better for tenants and indeed for many landlords than navigating a costly court process.
The TDS happens to be considered very pro-tenant, but ultimately this is just perception. I strongly suspect that the only reason it is considered so is because landlords tend to over-state damage or attempt to keep deposits for unreasonable things, and therefore the TDS ends up siding with the tenants more (I've heard ~80% anecdotally).
Is there any difference here? I guess it's government mandated and funded by mandated fees, rather than needing to appeal to or sell to companies, and therefore the incentive structure is better?
The difference is that the government requires that landlords use them, they don't have a choice, and I believe TDS is under contract from the govt so is incentivised to effectively implement the legislation, not to pander to landlords.
> It also negates the possibility of class-action suits, which are the only reasonable way anyone can get slapped for small harms to many people.
If the arbitration is effective then this would be unnecessary though. I'm not saying that arbitration is always, or even often good, but I don't think it's by-definition a bad idea, and I think TDS is a great example of where it can be quite pro-consumer.
Another pro-consumer idea is small-claims courts. They typically have a small fixed fee, explicitly don't require a lawyer for the claimant and have processes designed to be manageable by non-lawyers, and usually claim back the fee if the claimant wins. This would also make class-action lawsuits unnecessary.
Stepping back a bit... I think this might all be being viewed from a US-focused lens where class-action suits are the only option, small claims courts are less effective, and arbitration is near universally poorly implemented. This isn't how it needs to be though, and many countries make these concepts work fine and don't need to rely on things like class-action lawsuits (I'm not even sure we have them in the UK).
In many (if not most) cases, loosing at a fair arbitration would be cheaper for the company than winning in court by outspending on lawyers.
Of course, there's also the 'stopping class actions' thing.
I guess I can avoid the shorthand and say we all agreed except for monastic hermits and people who fled the country in search of the land of milk, honey, and unlimited jury trials.
> reasonable support for pro se representation in court
I've sat and watched about 100 cases. I've noticed if both parties are pro se, judges are usually reasonable.
If one party is pro se and the other is not, well I've never seen the pro se party get even a fair chance.
> lawyers win when people fight, and the more they fight, the more complicated the law and the case, the more wealth is transferred to the legal profession
A friend is a Federal Judge and told me they have a term for it the "Family Law Cartel". He said he can describe Family Law Court with one word: "Cesspool".
Depends what you mean by a fair chance, a lot of the pro se stuff I have seen the judges effectively hold the hands of the pro se litigant and effectively interpret everything they say very favourably.
Being pro se doesn’t mean you get to just chat with the judge to litigate the suite it’s meant to mean that you take on the role of a lawyer and are held to the same standards.
The math just works out a lot better to spend the money upfront to prevent "gotcha" moments than to lose tons of money on the backend either to a loophole or over having to sue.
This is a textbook case where an ounce of prevention is worth several pounds of cure. If you are signing or writing a contract worth 6 figures, get a lawyer/solicitor involved early. It's worth it.
They _SHOULD_, but is it really practical to expect people to?
The world is so fucked.
I'll pay the 1% once, thanks.
Most people don’t have a lawyer look over their employment contract, and most people don’t get screwed over like this when they don’t.
That is not a cut and dry situation.
Honestly, some kind of insurance would probably be more cost effective.
It's pretty cheap if it's a standard contract. If you're friends with a lawyer they will do it for free. They will generally tell you where the pitfalls are, even when you can't negotiate your contract.
I did read the massive contract with the union that effectively set the terms of my employment, because, of course. But I knew it wouldn't be too bad, because, well, numbers.
Tangential, there are some things that we humans can still do better than an AI, but it's not a given is going to remain like that forever. If things continue the way they go, people will still need food, shelter, healthcare and everything else, but economic organizations that provide those things may not need people. So, we should definitely be having a debate about the current social contract and how we will arrange the future to benefit us.
They complain about it because it's inconvenient to do, but it is very possible if you make it clear that it's what they have to do to hire you.
This contract wasn't a simple employment contract, though. It was a copyright license. A lawyer was probably involved, and custom provisions were probably expected.
The entire point of a jury trial is to let a group of peers decide whether they were willing to punish a citizen for the crime they were committed of. Laws come down to moral opinion, and jury trials are a way for the public to answer the question of what the general moral opinion of the time is. The jury decides (a) was a law broken, (b) dotthey agree with the law, and (c) are they willing to punish someone for it. This creates case law and ultimately should impact laws on the books - if people continue to acquit convictions because the crime isn't worth punishing, eventually the law should be changed.
Instead lawyers and judges have done an extremely effective job flipping the tables and telling juries their only job is to read a list of laws the court deemed relevant, hear evidence the court deemed important, and decide if the logic between fact and law holds true. Juries are pushed to consider only the statutes in question as written and aren't expected or asked to consider for themselves if the crime is something they even think matters.
I just don't see the point in a hurry trial if we aren't asking representatives of the community to weigh in on the law and punishment itself. If all we want is a system where legal statues are presented and evidence is compared against it, we really don't need a jury at all and might as well let the judge or OpenAI decide on what if basically boiled down to a mathematical equation.
Doing otherwise is known as nullification and you'll never sit on a jury if you even imply you know such a thing exists. Here's Paul Newman's character in the The Verdict arguing for it though:
https://www.americanrhetoric.com/MovieSpeeches/moviespeechth...
(The movie is well worth watching and pairs well with 12 Angry Men, both directed by Sidney Lumet.)
What is the point of a jury in your opinion, if not to act as a check on the legal system itself? If all we want is a list of the current laws as written and someone to compare evidence against it as a checklist, why bother adding potential inaccuracies by asking a jury of people who aren't trained in the law?
The check on the legal system is appealing to the higher courts. They can strike down laws that are against the constitution. Trials aren't referendums.
> If all we want is a list of the current laws as written and someone to compare evidence against it as a checklist, why bother adding potential inaccuracies by asking a jury of people who aren't trained in the law?
To avoid the consolidation of power in the hands of a few deciders. Especially as the deciders may come from a certain section of society (eg upper-class educated, and thus may unduly disregard the poor) they may have incentives or biases or connections that may influence their impartiality of their evaluation.
> To avoid the consolidation of power in the hands of a few deciders
Without jury nullification, I'm not quite sure how a jury actually avoids this. If the model is that the jury is tasked specifically and exclusively with listening to the specific laws deemed relevant by the lawyers, hear the evidence, and determine whether the combination of the two justify the charges then an unskilled jury is a risk. A seasoned judge would have a better ability to parse the case law and evidence to make this determination.
Without giving the jury the responsibility to deviate from what may technically have been a crime, why are they there? Do they really have a better skillet to determine whether the evidence proves beyond reasonable doubt that the law(a) were broken?
In many places the accused has the right to request a trial by judge. This can be done if, for example, the charges are so shocking that the accused feels that a juror cannot be trusted to be impartial.
> There is no such thing as valid jury nullification[.] You would violate your oath and the law if you willfully brought a verdict contrary to the law given to you in this case.
However, the link this is sourced from paints a very different picture. Right after those two sentences, the source says:
> the Kleinman court found [these] two sentences to be error because they suggested that nullification could be punished and that an acquittal resulting from nullification would be invalid.
Seems google didn't do a good job at providing a helpful summary of jury nullification.
To be sure, this can fail. You get a bunch of jurors who are ignorant or evil in a coherent way, who decide to ignore the law and effectively lynch a man because he's black or back up the school administrator who wants to teach creationism or Jewish space lasers or whatever. Personally, I think that's an acceptable risk, in part because if you take the application of the law away from sentimental flawed rational animals you have to give it to someone else - someone (or something) with power and sitting in the seat of authority. In a sense one way to characterize democracy is as a constant struggle between jury (electorate) and judge (political leader). The way the jury system is supposed to work, the fact it was written into the Constitution, is indeed very important and I'm glad for this sub-thread is talking about it.
I hate to say it, but there are times when something is illegal, but the scenario challenges that in a super compelling way. JN both brings that to light and gives a jury that opportunity to support an actor who has a valid basis for their actions.
I feel similar dynamics surround mandatory sentencing.
That idea kinda falls apart on areas that are or were particularly racist. When folks were consistently getting away with all sorts of crimes because of the color of their skin and consistent color of their victim's skin, deriving law from "the general moral opinion of the time" doesn't work.
As far as I see it, laws are entirely based on moral opinion and that itself is always going to be biased. The best we could do is have a set of laws that represents the majority moral opinion for any topic codified into law (or don't have the law at all). History is is full of examples where the majority moral opinion was bigoted, unfortunately.
From memory, 96% of cases are decided by plea bargaining.
If you follow the sources it takes you to this 80-page report, which I haven't read, but I assume the numbers are in there: https://www.fairtrials.org/articles/publications/the-disappe...
This website has a really great visualisation of the U.S. prison population: https://mkorostoff.github.io/incarceration-in-real-numbers/
And see here for its sources: https://github.com/MKorostoff/incarceration-in-real-numbers/...
Common (US, UK): research past cases -> argue based on precedent -> build new precedent
Roman (most of Continental Europe): research law -> argue based on law -> amend laws to avoid ambiguity
Under Roman Law precedent plays a much smaller role. This also means there's a lot less riding on any given case, since judges aren't bound to follow the decisions of past courts. What comes along with it is a need for very clean cut laws.
They accomplish mostly the same thing, with the critical difference that under common law you need ready access to past case law to have any fighting chance. Unfortunately, while technically public information, most good case law databases are behind very expensive subscription fees that only make sense if you're a lawyer.
So my take (again, not a lawyer, would love to hear how this picture is incomplete or outright wrong) is that the US legal system will remain biased against the poor until there's either:
- heavy public investment in free case law databases, or
- a shift toward a less ambiguous legal code (i.e. Roman Law) which is comprehensible to ordinary people
It probably like discussing Arsenal vs Liverpool to try and compare the two systems; one tends to like the home team. But since you extoll the virtues of Roman law I have to submit: it is in my view afflicted by some variant of naïve realism [0], the notion that one can capture the many-faceted reality in script, and then apply it across board. There is very little room for interpretation regarding the circumstances: the rules rule. Which can lead to absurd situations in the extreme, i.e. the case where a bus driver was deemed to be in the right (followed the rules) when he dumped a 6-year old in the middle of no-where because he didn't have a ticket (example from Sweden). In that regard a Common law system is preferable in my view.
But in all honesty, both systems are imperfect, and would probably benefit from some sort of blending. And yea - perhaps not so lawyer dependent.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Na%C3%AFve_realism_(psychology...
I really don't mean to imply that one system is better than the other. My point is that they both suck in different ways, and they both need to be fixed in different ways. You treat any social system like a machine and people will get caught in the gears.
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/03/corpora...
> I don't know if people have noticed, but lawyers win when people fight
People have disagreements. It's inevitable. It seems like you want people to never disagree on anything. But it's unclear how that can ever be possible.
> Judges cannot and should not look down on self-representing litigants
Is that not already the case? Is there anything preventing anyone from representing themselves?
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
If that was written today, it would be 700 pages long and packed with irrelevancies and obfuscation. The goal of those 700 pages was, at some point, to provide clarity, but that's obviously been an abysmal failure. In practice nobody knows exactly what they mean, even including the people signing it into law. And even those who do study those 700 pages will frequently come up with radically different interpretations. So you gain nothing, but make things completely incomprehensible to near 100% of the population.
And the same is true of contracts and the like. People are increasingly governed and compelled by language that may as well be Greek.
[1] - https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/full-text
I have been involved in three trial court cases where I represented myself ("pro se"). I won about 10% of dozens of motions I wrote and personally signed. Worse, in most of those cases the other side's lawyer was arguing a position obviously contrary to law, won anyway, and forced me to engage in extremely time consuming appeals process to correct the error.
Amazingly, I have ghostwritten about a dozen motions for co-parties represented by counsel and their counsel signed it. The success rate of those motions has been 100%.
At least with the three judges I have had, it seems like my filings were outright ignored and not read. As soon as a lawyer affixed their signature to my writing, the judge read it and took it seriously enough to apply the law correctly.
I know there is a lot of propaganda about self-represented litigants being treated fairly or with kid-gloves, but my personal experience suggests this is false.
> I'd like to see short contracts, arbitration, and reasonable support for pro se representation in court
The problem is in "short contracts". Short contracts are only helpful when both sides are "willing to work together" and the "spirit" of the contract is friendly. An example is a YC term sheet compared to Business Loan contract.
Once you get into an us vs them, you better hope your contract spells out exactly what happens to you and that it is in your favor.
If the contract is short, it leaves a lot of details open ended and all of a sudden interpretation sets in, "spirit of contract" sets in and the judge becomes the arbiter of how your contract gets decided. Better hope that particular judge likes you.
Instead of hoping that the judge/jury likes you, which is a game of dice, you write it into the contract up front and thusly we're back at complex, lawyer ridden contracts.
If courts were strict about limiting the ability of those with legal representation to write advantageous terms that give them advantage over those without council, there wouldn't be nearly as much of an issue.
The contract at issue here wasn't an employment contract, it was a copyright license. That license was likely written with lawyers on both sides and clients who are informed about the tradeoffs.
Housing loans, standard employment contracts, car loans, etc.
It's not so much that lawyers win when people fight, the problem is lawyers.
It's that people fight. The problem is people.
And life is complicated, so when people fight, all of the simplification you desire - short contracts, arbitration, support for people to represent themselves - will very quickly succumb to the myriad of edge cases life will throw at it. So over time, you'll get complicated long contracts and complex procedural dispute resolution processes, requiring someone with specialised, deep knowledge of the process and precedents and who will advocate on your behalf, for a fee.
You know, lawyers.
People fight. That's why lawyers win.
2>The solution is not to make more money to hire better lawyers, but to change the system so such a step isn't necessary.
3> I don't know if people have noticed, but lawyers win when people fight, and the more they fight, the more complicated the law and the case, the more wealth is transferred to the legal profession.
4 (Everyone go limp here, please! No fighting in court, ok? Just don't) ???
5 Profit!!! (Nobody stopped fighting. Nobody stopped being in court. You wanted that? Sucker! Someone profited from your noninvolvement.)
Seriously? Yes we need reform, but if lawyers are the most powerful bloc, how do we get them onboard? Would you convince them to treat law like golf, with handicaps? Would you somehow motivate other goals more than winning (at the risk of subverting justice)? What?
It happens across social contexts.
I’m convinced human language is good for nothing but the human equivalent of prompt injection.
Humanoids went millions of years before language intuiting “enough” food, warmth. We evolved to measure the gradients that make up our emotions. Social philosophy short circuits that connection to self.
Religion forced humans to serve a shared hallucination. Nation states are a similar constraint on human state.
There’s evidence in neuroscience teenage brains devalue moms voice for new info sources. Does not seem unreasonable this could be a lifelong thing. 13-14 years ago cloud and crud apps took off, now we’re moving onto AI.
Pop culture trends seem to fluctuate around similar timelines, though I admit to not measuring it. Just thinking out loud.
Obligation to preserve social language norms may one day be found to be a cause of much mental illness. We evolved for quite a while without them.
In France we have a labour law that codifies everything. There is no place for negotiation and for a typical contract you barely need to read it as it has to be according to the law. Notice period, vaction, all this is fixed.
Same when you buy a house. You get a contract that is always the same and where you cannot put unexpected clauses.
There are more similar cases so the everyday life of a generic citizen is legally predictable.
There are thousands of edges cases surrounding real property, so I can't imagine the standard contract has thousands of clauses.
I owned three apartments and it was all the same every time. My brother bought two houses - same. Similar for friends.
I am not sure what can vary from house to house which is not handled by the regulation. The pre-contract and contract elements are all very strict (who pays what, what the engagements are and it is not negotiable), the the house must adhere to the code except when listed, there is a time where you can raise issues that must be fixed etc.
To be clear, I do not doubt that there are edge cases but in the, say, 50 cumulated cases I know of there has never been a deviation from the standard contract. The value of the notary in France is to gather evidence, check that everything is there and read the contract over an hour or so. If it was more digitalized, I think we could bypass that part entirely for standard purchases.
they hide most of the profit in wierd finance games. So, the residuals? they dont have to be paid: its not "profitable"
Alec Guinness is an example of somebody smart enough to make his residuals work in Star Wars. He is said to have been overjoyed at the income, but continued to be underjoyed (tm) in the product.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/alec-gui...
Notice the “if any.” The lawsuit was because New Line had used crazy accounting to argue that the whole Lord of the Rings movie series was unprofitable. Of course that’s absurd on its face (no profit on $6 billion of revenue?), but don’t underestimate accountants. New Line had so butchered the accounting, they even had the audacity to claim that LOTR was responsible for “horrendous losses.”
Edit: Initially said Warner, because New Line is owned by Warner, but they weren’t back then and the lawsuits were involving New Line.
At the time it seemed like a good deal to Tolkien. A lot of money for something unfilmable with late-60s technology; but it would also help pay the heavy taxes his children would bear upon his death (which was, for him, the primary motivation).
This was just movie rights though. When Amazon wanted TV Show rights, the Estate squeezed out $250M. The Estate has also never sold any Silmarillion-related material.
Heh. Unfilmable didn't stop United Artists. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lord_of_the_Rings_(1978_fi...
(tongue firmly in cheek)
Pedantically, since it was animated, it wasn't "filmed" thus fulfilling the "unfilmable" part.
That's the most accurate description of that show I've read yet. But I will hand it to them: their depiction of the orcs was fantastic.
Anyway, I'm just talking about the visual depiction of the orcs. Compared to the LotR movies and Hobbit trilogy, they're utterly fantastic in this show; exactly what Tolkein himself probably would have imagined. The costuming there was just superb.
Why not? That was one of the big problems with Amazon's show: it couldn't use any material from The Silmarillion, only the appendices from RotK. Why wouldn't the estate want to capitalize on that, perhaps with some clauses to make sure it doesn't get butchered too much? They capitalized on the extra LotR material (to the tune of $250M as you said), so why stop there?
> Always ask for a piece of the gross. Not the net; the net is fantasy.
Paramount actually demonstrated its CTA accounting practices in court in 1990, such practices were found to be "unconscionable" by a judge, and the plaintiff Art Buchwald was permitted to proceed with a tort suit.
So while the practice itself obviously goes back a long way, Coming to America was the movie that revealed such practices to the general public, and even to Hollywood insiders -- thus, I'm sticking with my original statement.
https://elk.zone/mstdn.social/@Devilstower/11029957646932618...
It's a Mastodon frontend that's super simple/clean.
(Also from previous testing, it doesn't correctly support non-Mastodon instances which is depressing.)
Many sites will of course eschew this simple solution in favour of custom back button logic (usually to the mild detriment of the user experience).
But instead of reimplementing the browser’s one and potentially confusing the users, why not remove the button entirely and have people use their browser’s more consistent UI? If the extra space is awkward surely there’s something else that can go there.
There are useful cases for history.back, but I’m not sure a back button is it.
Two cases I’ve seen - one is a site with “single page app”ish flow for reading sequential posts, where rather than reloading the entire site it fetches just the JSON data for next and previous posts and updates the HTML; the back button here uses the already-fetched data rather than getting the whole site again. The other case used custom back logic on their site’s back button on form pages to avoid “re-sending form” pop-ups and to avoid losing entered form data.
When I said “mildly detrimental” I was thinking of a specific example (go back to the previous page that is on the same domain, implemented solely to improve metrics), so perhaps I shouldn’t have said “usually”.
[1] https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/blob/ff3b7069cf9dd8fc3f...
But there is a link on the page that says "back", which acts just clicking the browser back button.
I think this has been an available feature to web developers for well over a decade.
window.history.back() is as old as JavaScript I think. It was supported in Firefox 1 which was released in 2002.
If OP had negotiated the contract in good faith, I don't think this would have been an issue, but if there were lot of assholery in getting that contract, the network is happy to stick it back
What are the odds that a story of hollywood skulduggery ripping off the non-famous is actually dishonestly maligning hollywood execs & deal makers?
Possible, sure. My prior on hollywood execs turning out to actually be honest is pretty damn low. Yours?
What matters is having enough money or power to hold someone responsible for wronging you, without it ruining your life.
That's part of the double prejudice-- that if you're in the class that looks like it can get its way you get your way without the costs. If you're not and you scrape together the resources, you'll actually have to spend them and be thought of a trouble maker for it.
If they ever replayed the show on broadcast television I think he'd have a case for backpay.
If he is not the only person this has happened to, then such people could form a group and sue together.
The creator and show runner of Babylon 5 has talked extensively about these issues over the years and has commented on how much of the cast and crew only see residuals from the show being run on broadcast TV. A huge part of the previous writer strike was over these issues.
Fortunately somebody in my family had previously warned me about...was it Winston Groom? Anyway, I read the contract and got suspicious, and saw money being redirected in all kinds of sneaky ways before it would finally trickle in the direction of the actual creator, me! I called an attorney.
The attorney was super upset about it after some review, so I ended up pushing back in the negotiations with what amounted to way too much effort. The attorney was new, but at least they were on my side...
The contract was then handed off to someone with more time on their hands to negotiate with me. This person happened to be irritated by sneaky moves in general (lucky me) so he drafted a brief, completely new letter contract on the spot, right there with both of us in the office, and I signed it immediately.
At the time this creative effort was meant to pay my rent, and to think I almost did a bunch of work for no reasonable recompense and therefore almost couldn't make rent despite hours and days and weeks spent on the project made me really angry. I still really feel for people who end up in that same kind of situation.
If you are a creator you should at the very least know your industry groups. Whether you become an official member or not.
Working in music and 3D animation more regularly a bit later on in my early career, I was surprised to find the Graphics Artist Guild Pricing and Ethical Guidelines handbook extremely helpful. It had a lot to say about contracts as well, IIRC, and the organization also put on helpful webinars on contracts even in the early 2000s.
Few things felt quite as helpful around this topic as having someone who had negotiated hundreds of contracts with the Disney Corps of the world saying to you, "you are right to ask about that, and here are some ways to negotiate those terms" or just "that's a ridiculous thing to see in a contract, strike it out and give them my number if they complain".
> I still really feel for people who end up in that same kind of situation.
But regardless, I think our systems have failed if such a contract can exist legally, or without repercussions (because you aren't breaking the law if you don't get caught)
Not the least of which is the question of whether a judge or even mediator will ever even see the terms.
At least here in California there are also unfortunately no roaming sets of contract cops meting out street-contract-justice.
I bet there is something more to it than what he posted. Like, he got paid a certain wage, and would have received a bonus if the show was picked up by a major broadcaster.
The Sci-Fi channel was a cable television station and therefore not a "broadcast" station.
However, broadcast can also mean, in a general sense, to air a show.
I'm speculating here, but saying you will pay someone residuals if you "broadcast their show" may not have been a term that was equally understood by everyone. The writer and NBC both seem to have interpreted that term differently, to an amount that means nothing to NBC and a lot of money to an individual person.
Why would his salary change?
Or is this again a waitress issue? Instead of paying them proper money they get nothing and royalty?