SAG-AFTRA negotiations continue Friday – The Hollywood Reporter

Negotiations for Hollywood’s largest union are progressing.

SAG-AFTRA said Wednesday in a new joint statement with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which negotiates on behalf of studios and streamers, that talks will continue Friday and resume Monday. The joint statement and continuation of negotiations are likely to be seen as a positive sign as the actors’ strike continues into 2023.

“SAG-AFTRA and AMPTP met for a day-long negotiating session and reached a conclusion,” the statement said. “Negotiations will continue on Friday, October 6th, with the parties working internally over the weekend and will resume on Monday, October 9th.”

SAG-AFTRA resumed negotiations with the AMPTP on Monday for the first time since the July 14 strike. The parties changed venues — meeting at the union’s national headquarters in Los Angeles rather than the AMPTP offices in Sherman Oaks — and brought in some of the industry’s top executives, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos and the CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery David Zaslav, Bob Iger, CEO of Disney, and Donna Langley, Chairman and Chief Content Officer of NBCUniversal Studio Group. Both sides took a break on Tuesday before resuming talks on Wednesday.

SAG-AFTRA’s national executive director and chief negotiator, Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, took a break from negotiations on Wednesday to speak before the Federal Trade Commission about the threat posed by generative AI to the creative industries – one of SAG-AFTRA’s key themes in its negotiations is for 2023. In the talk, Crabtree-Ireland argued that there is a “double standard” when it comes to the use of AI by studios and entertainment companies. “If an individual decides to infringe the copyrighted content of one of these companies and distribute it without paying for the licensing rights, that individual would face significant financial and legal consequences,” Crabtree-Ireland said. “So one of the reasons the opposite isn’t true? Shouldn’t the people whose intellectual property was used to train the AI ​​algorithm be at least equally protected?”

There’s more to come.