They ask me because I have been on the board of CLNZ for the
last four years, so I know a bit about it. I sent one member a long explanation
recently and am posting a version of it here so that others can read it. Also I
am far too lazy to email everyone individually. So here goes:
What CLNZ does is sell licences to
institutions so they may legally copy, scan and share printed material such as books,
periodicals and journals. Terms and conditions most certainly apply. What has
been copied by each institution is identified by sampling and the money due is
paid out to the publishers who then pass on to the authors their share. (Yes
they do. Anyone who thinks their multinational publisher is bilking them is,
frankly, an idiot. Multinationals are squeaky clean – they have to be. The only
publisher who has ever ripped me off was a much-loved small indie. Most of them
are clean but, you know, count the spoons.)
CLNZ’s income is almost entirely from universities,
polytechs and schools, in that order: the licence fee is based on the number of
students. There are other sources – corporates, law firms, government
departments, “private training establishments” such as language schools – but
the main source by far is universities. So most of the work copied is from
textbooks. Maths, biology, engineering, architecture, medicine, anthropology, history,
philosophy, political studies, music, chemistry, law and stuff like that.
Very few members of NZSA would have books on these course
lists. NZ fiction and poetry is taught at tertiary level, but it’s a tiny
component of all the copying that is done. And (whisper it) NZSA does not represent
all NZ authors. It does in principle – it argues for all authors’ rights – but
it doesn’t in practice. One very successful publisher who always cleans up at
the book awards tells me that of the 347 authors on the firm’s list, only seven
are NZSA members. So it’s no great surprise that most NZSA members never see a
CLNZ payment: they don’t write text books or general books that are used in
university courses.
I received $15 one year but I don't know what for – possibly
one of my joke books, possibly
the more serious The Dirty
Decade or An Affair of the Heart,
very improbably my cookbook. And the reason I got a cheque that year but not
the year before or the year after is that a different set of schools and universities
are sampled each year – so if your work is used one year in just one school or
university, that copying might never be recorded.
The sampling process is fiendishly complicated – the key
point is the trade-off between accuracy and income. If the RRO (generic term
for an organisation like CLNZ) aimed for 100% accuracy, the process would be so
expensive that there would be no money left to distribute to authors and
publishers. So we have to accept a degree of inaccuracy. The sampling process
used is regarded internationally as best practice. I have attended the annual
conference of IFRRO, the international organisation of RROs, and the
intellectual firepower there is very impressive: the whole structure is as
author-friendly as could be. What the current regime at NZSA doesn’t get is
that the copyright holders – authors and publishers – are partners, not
combatants. Over individual contracts, certainly, we can be combatants but not
on big industry-wide issues like copyright.
Members of IFRRO have reciprocal arrangements, so much of
the revenue generated here goes overseas to pay authors and publishers in the
UK, US, Australia etc. Similarly, we receive payments from them, about $1
million a year. Again, most of these will be for textbooks. The share for
literary works will be tiny. I don’t know, none of my business, can only guess,
but I imagine that authors whose works are taught in courses on post-colonial
literature – maybe Keri Hulme, Witi Ihimaera, Patricia Grace, Alan Duff – will
do well, but the rest of us, not so much.
What remains available for distribution in NZ is, depending
on the contract, split 50/50 between publisher and author, so while it looks as
though CLL has a huge pile of money that should be going to NZSA members, it
just isn’t true. Never was, never will be, never could be.
Another issue is that it can be hard, if not impossible, for
some payments from overseas (looking at you, ALCS)
to be identified as to which author’s work has been copied – anthologies and
the like are difficult. Some NZ authors are happy to deal with ALCS direct;
others will let CLNZ do it for a fee.
Final point: CLNZ is a non-profit organisation. NZSA is a
50/50 shareholder in it with PANZ, the publishers’ organisation, but the term
“shareholder” is very misleading. It implies that the shareholder should get a
return – but for a non-profit that would be illegal.
Sadly, for the members of NZSA there
is no pot of gold.
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