First off, I’m agreeing with you. It’s a lot like what an old Boss told me: “…everyone gets screwed over when they buy their first new car”. I can emphasize with her… a lot. For the past two years, in my free time, I became involved with a fan page for The Late Show. I often wrote funny bits for other people who wrote on the page under my name so we could entertain each other. Slowly but surely I noticed some of what I wrote appearing in monologues. I have to tell you, I was ecstatic! “Hey, look I’m Famous!”.
The problem was that “Hey look I’m Famous” was often responded to with “Hey look, you’re a Liar” which wasn’t true. So, I’d print what I wrote with it’s time stamps and I’d tell people to look for the episode on YouTube or FB that broadcast the following day. They’d see my point, but they’d then say,
“Yeah? Then how come you aren’t in the credits? How come he never says your name on the air? There’s no accreditation there that we can see. Also, his show pulls in huge amounts of money from CBS and he is wealthy beyond compare. Where’s your paycheck?”
They were right. It was my work, my comedy… it was what I’d written… but there was absolutely nothing that I could put into a portfolio and present to an agent or an employer as examples of my work. It started to really bother me in 2019 when the show was nominated for two Emmys and my material was used in the monologues for both of those episodes. At that point, when I wrote my comedy, I started adding a line at the bottom that I was the creator of the work and asking that the work not be used without attributing my work to me.
Keep in mind that during all those years that I had been applying for jobs with CBS/VIACOM daily … even internships … because I felt I was that good and that I had what it takes to succeed if I could get my foot in the door. Not one application was ever taken seriously; not one interview ever occurred even though my work was being broadcast on their network weekly. Family advised me that they’re just acting like thieves by stealing my work w/o paying for it or attributing me for it, so I stopped submitting new things.
That’s when I funny thing happened: my old submissions that hadn’t been used before? They started showing up on the air! It was if they had run a search filter through and were squeezing the last drops out of the lemon. That’s when I tweeted to the show “Hey, bit XX was really funny last night! I would know, I wrote it. If you want to use my work, you need to credit me for it on the show. I mean, you’re not a thief, right?” No response, no reply.
Long story short, if you don’t know the business, it’s very easy to get ripped off/stolen from.
It happens every day. It happened to me.