Mark, I’m guessing you’ve never been involved in a WGA arbitration for credit have you? With many productions being in development for an average of 10 years, there can often be over 30 drafts with literally dozens of writers or writing teams not to mention the specific punch ups by writers who contractually don’t want credit. While in the end only a very small handful are going to get credit, the credit is based on who wrote what and how much of it. This is where having the ability to go back and see who actually wrote which particular lines could make the process much simpler than some of the shenanigans that currently goes on in assigning credit. The credit assignation is generally done by the WGA and it’s fairly routine for almost all of them to be arbitrated. Because of the way credit is given, it’s usually fairly difficult for the first writer(s) to not get at least partial shared credit. Generally the paid drafts that are handed into the studio are the ones which are used, though depending on the legal paper trail, it can sometimes be the drafts handed into the production company when there hasn’t been a studio directly involved in the overall process.

Sadly, version control isn’t quite simple enough to make it a thing that everyday people might use yet, but the day is certainly coming…

GitHub is also, by it’s commercial nature, a more open platform, so security isn’t as good as it is with others like Bitbucket which have more privacy and distribution controls. It would more likely be these more secure/controllable platforms that would be used for near-instantaneous delivery or pre-approved access for scripts within the entertainment community. There’s certainly a much better way to improve this type of business information flow within the community.