The Screen Actors Guild board of directors on Saturday rejected the “last, best and final offer” by Hollywood producers for a new contract.
The contract was rejected by 73 percent of SAG’s board members, spokeswoman Pamela Greenwalt said in a statement.
SAG called the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers’ demand for the contract to run for three years instead of two, “regressive and damaging.”
Producers insist the three-year contract would start when it is ratified, instead of when the last one expired, which would mean SAG would not be able to join with the writers’ and directors’ guilds to increase their bargaining power when their contracts expire in 2011.
A statement released by the producers alliance said its offer was strong and fair and it had always sought a three-year deal, just as it had negotiated with other guilds and unions.
“We simply cannot offer SAG a better deal than the rest of the industry achieved under far better economic conditions than those now confronting our industry,” the statement said.
AMPTP spokesman Jesse Hiestand declined to comment beyond what was in the statement.
Greenwalt declined to comment when asked what the next step in negotiations would be.
SAG is the last holdout among several unions that have agreed to long-term contracts. The guild has opposed the producers’ previous offer, saying it failed to guarantee guild coverage in productions made for the Internet and failed to make residual payments on made-for-Internet content that is rerun online, among other issues.
Google Opens Its Defense In Antitrust Case Alleging Monopoly Over Online Ad Technology
Google opened its defense against allegations that it holds an illegal monopoly on online advertising technology Friday with witness testimony saying the industry is vastly more complex and competitive than portrayed by the federal government.
"The industry has been exceptionally fluid over the last 18 years," said Scott Sheffer, a vice president for global partnerships at Google, the company's first witness at its antitrust trial in federal court in Alexandria.
The Justice Department and a coalition of states contend that Google built and maintained an illegal monopoly over the technology that facilitates the buying and selling of online ads seen by consumers.
Google counters that the government's case improperly focuses on a narrow type of online ads — essentially the rectangular ones that appear on the top and on the right-hand side of a webpage. In its opening statement, Google's lawyers said the Supreme Court has warned judges against taking action when dealing with rapidly emerging technology like what Sheffer described because of the risk of error or unintended consequences.
Google says defining the market so narrowly ignores the competition it faces from social media companies, Amazon, streaming TV providers and others who offer advertisers the means to reach online consumers.
Justice Department lawyers called witnesses to testify for two weeks before resting their case Friday afternoon, detailing the ways that automated ad exchanges conduct auctions in a matter of milliseconds to determine which ads are placed in front of which consumers and how much they cost.
The department contends the auctions are finessed in subtle ways that benefit Google to the exclusion of would-be competitors and in ways that prevent... Read More