TL;DR - No one owns the rights to script a scene. Itās fair to script a scene that has already been scripted, but I think the community is better served when we try to publish something that has never been published before. Aside on script quality.
I feel like Iām late to the party here, but I also feel like I have to share some thoughtsā¦
I donāt think anyone here will tell anyone else that they canāt publish their own work. Full stop. I absolutely support everyone having a voice, and everyone having the ability to publish their own original works.
For full disclosure, for those who may not know, I am a paid scripter, so all of my comments come from that viewpoint. Iām trying VERY hard not to offend anyone here. I respect every scripter at every level who takes the time to learn scripting and releases their work to the public, for free or not for free.
I very recently released a paid script that someone else released for free. We try to avoid that, but things happen and it really isnāt a big deal. I noted that I was scripting it, and I took a couple of weeks to get it right, and during that time someone else released it. Fair enough. No one is under any obligation to check to see what else has been scripted or may be in the process of being scripted. Both scripts are available, and generally speaking Iām not sure the free script hurt my ability to earn with my paid script. A brief look at the heatmaps will tell you that theyāre very different scenes.
I will say that I think itās pretty naive to say that paid scripts are rushed. Nothing could be further from the truth. Regardless of the platform (at least the ones we use in this community), everything is thoroughly validated by another person before things can be published. If theyāre not up to par, they are sent back to be reworked. Those of us doing paid work take it VERY seriously, and Iām a bit offended to see that there is doubt. The machine learning applications have made it so that questionable scripts can be released very, very quickly. Meanwhile the paid scripts are all manually coded, frame by frame, and they absolutely take longer to produce. (Many of the free scripts are also manually coded frame by frame, and I donāt want to imply otherwise.)
As someone else referenced, there have been issues where certain studios have tried to get in the game and done it poorly, but those in this community (free or paid) have nothing to do with those situations.
There are a number of scripters producing free scripts here for whom I have enormous respect. There are some really fantastic free scripts out there where you can easily tell that the scripter knows what theyāre doing and that they put in the time to get the details right. But I would be remiss if I didnāt say that there is a very wide range of quality in the available free scripts. That is FAIR and TO BE EXPECTED in a community like ours. Many of the scripts posted here are first-time scripters, and this community is here to help educate. We canāt do that without seeing those first scripts and offering help. Beginners become great scripters if they stick with it, and this is the place to play, release first scripts, get feedback, etc. Thatās largely the point of this community!
As an aside, and completely off-topic, I think the range of quality among free scripts is something of an elephant in the room within the community. I donāt think any of us want to be discouraging, particularly to new scripters, but not every free script is good. Some are actually pretty bad. No one wants to say anything because we want to encourage everyone as much as we can. This is a very supportive community the vast majority of the time, and I love that about this forum and larger community. But for the sake of this discussion, I donāt think we can pretend that all scripts are created equal. Again, I have enormous respect for some of the free scripters here, and they absolutely do work that is of the same quality as paid scripts. No one wants to be the guy who said something that made a new scripter stop scripting, and as a result thereās not a lot of constructive criticism, and there are a lot of scripts that end up being unusable.
I guess what Iām really saying at the end of the day is that everyone should absolutely feel free to script what they want to script. I believe the community as a whole is better served when we take aim at one of the many thousands of scenes that has never been scripted, but that belief shouldnāt prevent anyone from doing what they want to do. No one owns the rights to script a scene. Likewise, I feel perfectly free to produce a paid script for a scene that has a free script if I donāt feel that the free script is as good as it should be. Iāve never chosen to do that knowingly, but I canāt say I never would. And if I did decide to do that, I have absolutely no right to request that the free scripts be removed.
No one should feel like they have to notify me or āget my permissionā to publish a script for a scene Iāve released professionally. I personally feel that my time is more valuable to me than $4 for something that will take me 10 or 15 hours to produce. It is a bummer about the crypto thing, and I get thatā¦ But I still feel that the time spent would be BETTER spent producing something that has never been done before.
Anyway, those are my thoughts. I think this has been a good discussion, and I love that everyone kept it civil and exchanged ideas and thoughts like adults! Another part of what makes this community great.
And in case i havenāt said it lately, THANK YOU to everyone who produces scripts! The time you invest in these scripts does not go unnoticed!
(Sorry for the novel)
. I tested some scripts on videos I like and I was disappointed with the quality, but it never occurred to me to revise the video and repost it here. If people want to do it, the internet (this forum) is a free roam for anything.