Royalty battle continues for Australian writers

22 May, 2015

The work of collecting payments for Australian performance writers goes from strength to strength, the AWGACS annual meeting was told.

Tim Pye, chairman of the Australian Writers Guild Authorship Collecting Society, told its annual meeting in Sydney on 21 May 2015 that AWGACS now had almost 1,500 members, an increase of 150 during the year.

“[In 2014] we collected almost $1.4m from twenty-five territories around the world,” he said. “That money will be distributed this year and we are hopeful that collections for this calendar year will be as bountiful.” 

He said that although AWGACS was a relatively small collecting society by world standards, its active participation in the formulation of policy within the international association of collecting societies made it an important and influential player and had a significant positive impact on the royalties it had been able to collect. 

“And as authors’ rights and collecting societies in Asia continue to grow in size and influence, with our involvement in the region via CISAC – the international governing body- this will continue to be the case,” he went on.

Tim reported that AWGACS was very actively negotiating with Screenrights to secure secondary royalties for members. This was also detailed in the recent letter to members from the Board.

“We are determined to pursue scriptwriters’ rights because that is our raison d’etre,” he said. “It is why we exist.”

“I am hopeful that when I sit down to deliver next year’s report, I will be able to tell you of the progress we have made in our pursuit of integrity, transparency and accountability.”