News March 30, 2010 For many years, since 1996, CARCC has distributed Access Copyright royalties to CARCC affiliates. Access Copyright is a rather large Canadian organization that issues blanket licences allowing users, mainly organizations like governments, universities, schools, libraries, and corporations, to photocopy or scan material that is published in print. Using by photocopy or scan is known as reprography, and it is part of the reproduction rights outlined in the Copyright Act. Printed matter is copyrighted – the rightsholders might include publishers, designers, writers, and visual artists. The royalties that Access Copyright collects are distributed to rightsholders in several ways. There are payments for uses that have been identified, either by the users or because someone applied for a licence to copy specific works, or payments to foreign rightsholder organizations. One third of the royalties, however, are associated with non-title specific licenses and are paid out to rightsholders who have shown that they have a copyright for works that have been published in print. It is impossible to fully track what printed matter is photocopied, so rightsholders are paid an annual royalty calculated by formula. The news is that the formula has changed. It used to be that a proportion of the royalties collected by Access Copyright were allocated annually to a pool for payments to unidentified rightsholders – the pool is called the Repertoire. The Repertoire was divided between creators and publishers, based on basic percentages, and the creators’ portion was simply divided equally among those who had assigned rights to Access Copyright. The creators who signed up for the royalty were mainly writers and signing up was a fairly complex process. CARFAC and CARCC had approached Access Copyright in the 1990s about including visual artists among the payees. There have been agreements between CARCC and Access Copyright that acknowledged CARCC affiliates as rightsholders, and allowed CARCC to distribute Access Copyright royalties to CARCC affiliates. CARCC has an assignment of rights from its affiliates which enables it to collect royalties on their behalf, so signing up directly with Access Copyright was not necessary. The relationship became more complex around 2007 as CARCC affiliates were required to prove that they had works published in print. In an effort to make the Repertoire distribution fairer, as other reprographic rights organizations, including Copibec in Quebec, have done, Access Copyright has adopted a new and much more complex formula for determining the amount of each creator’s Repertoire royalty. The new formula divides writers and visual artists into separate creator groups. The writers’ royalty is calculated based on the number of pages they have in print, and other factors, including the age of the work. The visual artists’ royalty is based on the number of images each rightsholder has published in print, as well as other factors that include the age of the publication. The more images or pages a creator has published, the more will be their share of the Repertoire. Writers who are also visual artists (or vice versa) will share in both the writers’ and visual artists’ amounts. Each eligible creator will be entitled to a base amount, and the amounts related to numbers of publications will be added to that. The eligibility criteria have also changed. As before, a creator must provide proof that he or she has one work published in print by providing a photocopy of the publication in order to establish basic eligibility. A second order of registration has been added – creators are now asked to count the number of publications and the number of images (or pages, for writers) published in each year between 1989 and 2008, and to sign a declaration that their count is truthful and that they are a rightsholder in the publications. Access Copyright will audit the submissions. Creators may use Access Copyright’s online system to do the declaration. The submissions should be updated as creators publish more material. It should be noted that all declared publications should bear an ISBN or ISSN number - this means that the smaller, more ephemeral types of publication that are prevalent in the visual arts do not count. Access Copyright has decided that images that appear in advertisements will not count either. Do not include these in your own counts of works when you submit them. There will be a publicity campaign by Access Copyright advertising the new system, called Payback, to visual artists. If you are already receiving the royalty through CARCC you should follow the instructions in the package that was recently mailed. If you are a new CARCC affiliate you will have received information concerning your eligibility already from CARCC. You do not need to sign up again with Access Copyright. If you have questions about the royalty, please do get in touch with me at CARCC, either by telephone or email. It remains to be seen how much individual creators will receive in 2010. The amounts could vary significantly from the royalties paid in the past – some people will get more and some people will get less. That is one question that I cannot answer! We shall see what the future brings. Janice Seline
June 2008 There have been notices in the newspapers advising artists and other creators that they may be eligible to receive royalties related to the settlement of a class action suit known as Robertson v. Thomson. Journalist Heather Robertson initiated the suit in 1996, challenging the publication of her writing on websites without her permission. The suit became a class action representing writers, photographers, visual artists, illustrators, editors and others – creators who hold copyright – against several media giants. The list of magazines and newspapers that have been reproduced on the internet is comprehensive, and includes a number of art-related publications. Artists should review their own archives to see if there is anything of theirs that might be included. The deadline to submit a claim is January 18 2010. Please find all the information about the case, the lists of publications, the instructions for submitting a claim, and the necessary forms at: http://www.kmlaw.ca/Case-Central/Overview/Court-Documents/?rid=104
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