Revealed Emails/Court Documents regarding Pixar/Steve Jobs Wage Fixing

[Landguy]

mornelithe said:

Landguy said:

mornelithe said:

Excuse me, but that's a load of bullshit.  Yeah, I'm sure Sony hiring some employees from Pixar, Dreamworks and ILM was really going to destroy 3 multi-billion dollar corporations, how fragile Pixar, ILM and Dreamworks really must be, right?

And the prosecution doesn't have to prove anything other than beyond reasonable doubt.  So even if the agreement isn't written down in black and white, these emails and statements from current/former employees, and especially from Sony could more than prove the case.  The statements made in the depositions and the emails, thus far, definitely suggest wage fixing was taking place.

I wasn't talking about destroying the whole parent companies.  I was talking about these particular animation companies.  If you look up these companies, you will see that the parties involved weren't reall Sony the parent company, but these small companies started for the sole purpose of animation.  THese small companies have to earn their profits.  The Sony division that they talk about is actually gone now because it couldn't actuall make it...

This isn't about Sony...this is about fair market competition for skilled labor.  The value of a job, is supposed to be determined by the market, not by a bunch of industry execs colluding with each other.  As I said, that's illegal.

Pixar, isn't a small company, it was started in 1986, and by the time of this particular issue (2002), was far from being small.  Likewise with Dreamworks, who had just come off of making roughly 267 million dollars off of Shrek alone, in 2001.  These are not 'small' animation groups.

Again, I didn't make my point clear.  Sony bought Columbia pictures back in 1989.  When they decided to start Sony Animation Studios(a division of Columbia which was owned by its parent Sony), that is how this whole thing came to light.  The same can be said for Dreamworks.  The small company inside of Dreamworks, was Dreamworks Animation.  Pixar was also made up of lots of small companies.  Most large companies are this way.

When it comes to quoting $267 million for Shrek, that was the revenue generate by the movie, not the profit.  Dreamworks Animation itself would have only seen a small percentage (probably only 20-30%)of the actual profit($30-40 million) as they distributed all of their movies through movie studios(Paramount at the time I think) with distribution arms.

My point was that many of these companies worked togther on many projects through various deals in place by them or their parent companies.  Because of that, they may have had an understanding that they would not harm themselves through cut throat business practices.  By harming thm, they would in fact be harming themselves.

I don't disagree, that this may have impacted the earnings potential of these employees in the short term.  But it could just as easily proven to hurt their ability to be employed later by other studios.  That was my point in bringing up the demise of Sony's animation studio.  They burned the bridges(partnerships) with other studios and eventually failed.  Not sure how that helped anyone else out.  It probabaly damaged the careers of those who got involved to a degree.

Remeber, these "agreements" may have stopped companies from directly approaching employees without consent, but proabably couldn't stop these employees from seeking employment on their own.  That is what the Law was about(or at least its apllication here).