Laura Murray: A Cooperative Future for Access Copyright?

Laura Murray: A Cooperative Future for Access Copyright?

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 Friedland reveals a stunning array of out-of-date formulas, nonexistent formulas, unfair formulas, and money handed out to publishers with no mechanisms to ensure that it be forwarded to creators.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.