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Comment by Retric | Hacker News Reader

What about this one:

6 points by pierrefar 2 hours ago | link

The numbers are scary: WB claims to be $300k out but they're not accounting for a sizable revenue stream. The post mentions the band earned $12k in 5 years from albums they control, and they expected the albums WB control to earn 2-5X more. Assume 5x$12, and you'll get closer to $200k.

Do that over quite a few years, and they'll end up owing the band money while the band members are alive. Keep telling them $62 over five years and they'll never ever need to write them a cheque.

How is this not pure and simple theft?

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Sounds more like a court case with WB and not a blog post whinging about the terms. HN Post calculations are worth the paper they're written on.

If anyone is owed multiple $100K, for any reason, there should be motivation to hire a legal team to ask for it. Those sorts of cases happen successfully all the time, and the band guy should start his own action.

But he'd need to be nursing circa $500K loss for him to be $100K in credit by the time the settlement was awarded

There is an interesting interview with the producer of Babylon 5 where in theory he is owed 10's of millions because he traded salary for a large slice of whatever profit showed up.

However, the contract was written so they could do some accounting tricks and make it look like the show was a net loss. He knows the game well enough to know he was never going to see the money. But there was an odd moment where an executive happened to mention the actual billion in profit from the show. And he said something about his cut. At which point the executive said something about how it was still in the red. Even though as a producer he know how much the show cost, he could read the subtext and in the interview he said "I want to keep working in Hollywood and I know the game."

However, if he took them to court he could probably get a large payout at the cost of never working in Hollywood again.

Ah, the infamous Hollywood Accounting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting

They apparently tried to pull something similar with Peter Jackson and the billions of dollars from LOTR, though Jackson did end up taking them to court.

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