Residuals are a rather fantastical compensation mechanism when compared with other industries. Imagine if software developers kept receiving a paycheck as long as the company was still making money from your software.

Marc Andreesen would still be getting residuals from Firefox for code still around from the Netscape Navigator days. Similar for Windows 95 code in modern Windows. https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/14229/is-there-any-code-in-firefox-as-of-2020-that-comes-from-netscape-navigator

Is there any code in Firefox (as of 2020) that comes from Netscape Navigator?

Inspired by comments on the previous question Is it true that Netscape Navigator eventually became Mozilla Firefox? (Answer: Yes). In 1998, Netscape released a large amount of their existing sourc...

Retrocomputing Stack Exchange

@carnage4life It’s not dissimilar from the fights you see around licensing of things like libraries and how that intersects with open source. Some people get very worked up about not getting a share of revenue when they feel like someone downstream from them is making more than they do.

The history here matters a lot. Screenwriting sort of developed out of playwriting where you have licensing for performances, which makes the idea of residuals entirely reasonable.