Luc Latulippe

Martin Friedland’s report on the way Access Copyright divvies up the money it collects from educational institutions and other licensees was truly shocking to me. I’ve been a critic of Access Copyright for quite some time, but I always figured (hoped?) the main problem was transparency: mechanisms and principles for allotting revenues were not made public, and that bothered me as a matter of principle. Well, it turns out that the people inside Access Copyright haven’t known what’s going on either. Friedland reveals a stunning array of out-of-date formulas, nonexistent formulas, unfair formulas, and money handed out to publishers with no mechanisms to ensure that it be forwarded to creators. For example, Friedland notes that:

"...some publishers do not pass on to unaffiliated authors the author’s share of reprography royalties that the publisher receives from Access Copyright. Included in this category is one very major newspaper which takes the position that as it does not acquire authors’ reprographic rights under its contracts, none of the income that it receives from Access Copyright can be for authors. The company maintains that it is up to the authors to join Access Copyright and claim it themselves."

For more on this question of what happens to monies owed to creators who haven’t joined Access Copyright, and for the general issue of “flowthrough” via publishers, see the report. Of course, some money does go directly to creators: every creator registered with Access gets $500 a year just for showing up. There is no acknowledgment that some of these authors have published thousands of well-selling pages while others are one-time wonders: amazingly, Access has no information on these factors. I could go on, but the basic picture is an organization with little clarity on who gets what and why.