Ken Osmond is better known as Eddie Haskell, the iconic friend of Wally Cleaver on the "Leave It to Beaver" television show. He wants to know why he hasn’t seen a penny of the 8M dollars showbiz union Screen Actors Guild is said to have collected from foreign royalties. According to the Associated Press, Osmond claims SAG has been collecting foreign royalties for over ten years for various uses of television and movie properties, supposedly on behalf of the actors who made them, but is simply sitting on the pile of cash. His complaint is in the form of a class action suit on behalf of himself and 30K other actors/stakeholders. SAG is said to have stated that coming up with a payout system is "complex" and hasn’t been worked out as yet.
TVBR/RBR observation: All of which begs the question: Who really benefits when royalties are collected, the artists who are trotted out in front of congressional committees as compelling victims, or the organizations getting them to trot out there? If a union is having trouble compensating its own members with the royalties it collects, what can we expect from giant recording conglomerates? Are these companies, who often have an adversarial relationship with their own roster of artists, going to make sure the artists receive maximum benefit of new royalty collections from over-the-air and high priced internet levies? Makes you wonder.
