Copyright Licensing NZ makes sure that
authors and publishers are paid for the use of their work in schools, universities,
training institutions, corporate libraries, copy shops
and more. CLNZ is a very good thing: I was on the board for six years, from 2009
to 2014, so know exactly how good it is and how dedicated the staff are.
Thing is,
most NZ copyright material used in the licensed organisations is educational,
which is why educational authors get the vast bulk of payments. (One author of maths textbooks, his
publisher told me, earns over a million a year in royalties and gets each year from
CLNZ a cheque for a small but gratifying single-digit multiple of 10 to the
power of 5: I so wish I had finished my maths degree.)
Fiction
and poetry authors, not so much: I got a cheque for $15 a few years ago. This
is why, to the annoyance of fiction and poetry authors, the CLNZ grants/awards
are skewed toward educational
authors: it’s them what pays the bills. But I digress.
CLNZ is
about to start a quarterly newsletter for authors and publishers, Copy.Write, with information about its
funding programmes as well as topical copyright-related issues. We can all keep
up with this ourselves by going to the IFRRO
and IAF websites – but we don’t,
do we? I don’t. So this looks like a very useful initiative.
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