Guilty Pleasures: The Copyright and Labor of Reality Television

Authors

Emily Tracy, University of GeorgiaFollow

Abstract

The Writers Guild of America’s 2023 strike forced audiences to reckon with Hollywood’s labor issues and the powerhouse unions that seek to solve them. Television networks responded with “strike-proof” fall schedules that highlighted a gap in the entertainment industry’s union membership: reality television. This Note examines and questions that gap, focusing on the labor of reality story producers and the important role it plays in creating a copyrightable product. Although copyright doctrine offers story producers little to no protection against exploitation, copyright case law implicitly recognizes story producers as, essentially, writers. This Note uses that case law to argue that story producers and scripted television writers share an overwhelming community of interest and belong in the same collective bargaining unit. Finally, this Note suggests the labor doctrine of accretion as a method for reality story producers to gain membership in the Writers Guild of America.

Recommended Citation

Emily Tracy, Guilty Pleasures: The Copyright and Labor of Reality Television, 31 J. Intell. Prop. L. 331 (2024).
Available at: https://digitalcommons.law.uga.edu/jipl/vol31/iss2/7