ALCS – 45 years of making a positive impact on writers’ lives
T
HIS year, ALCS celebrates 45 years of paying authors the money they wouldn’t otherwise
receive, championing writers’ rights and raising awareness of the importance of copyright and intellectual property to all creators. Here, the long- time sponsor of CILIP’s Yoto Carnegie Greenaway Medals sets out to explain what exactly it does, and how.
ALCS – who?
Lots of people find ALCS a bit of a mystery. But it’s pretty simple. The Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society is a not-for- profit organisation that was set up by writers in 1977, for writers. We support, champion and fight for writers of all kinds. We pay our members the royalties earned for the secondary use of their work through photocopying and retransmission, and campaign for and protect their rights. Today, ALCS represents more than 114,000 members internationally and we’ve paid out over £600m to our members. There’s no other organisation quite like us.
Small beginnings, big ambitions It all goes back to a small, spirited group of writers whose unpaid work became the bedrock for many of the rights that writers across the UK and world now benefit from. One November evening in 1973, the members of the Writers’ Action
Group (WAG) – led by writer and campaigner Brigid Brophy and poet, playwright and novelist Maureen Duffy – gathered at a pub in Chelsea, London. Maureen suggested that WAG members form an authors’ lending rights society – run by authors, for authors – to administer Public Lending Right. A hat was passed round to collect donations for this worthy new cause. The main principle? “No Use Without Payment”.
‘The magic money tree’ – what we do
Our members include fiction and non-fiction writers, translators, poets, adaptors, scriptwriters, magazine and journal article writers, as well as editors in all genres. We collect the money accrued through the secondary use of any works produced by a writer. This is when a third party uses a work that’s already been distributed to the public, such as when schools photocopy books they own, or libraries lend books, or overseas TV companies retransmit UK TV signals. Royalties from secondary rights are paid to writers through ALCS – unless the royalties come from UK library lending, when Public Lending Right (PLR) pays them. Publishers deal with primary rights and we deal with secondary rights.
Words and politics ALCS might not have succeeded without the support of playwright, novelist, screenwriter and its first chairman, Lord Ted Willis.
Miriam Foley is communications manager at ALCS.
Remembering back, Maureen says: “He could open parliamentary doors for us, table questions and bills in the Lords and, along with Michael Foot, get us the support of Prime Minister Jim Callaghan and the Labour government. This meant we could also get TUC support, which I managed to do at the TUC Brighton Congress in 1978. I still have my delegate’s badge.”
With the support WAG had from champions in parliament, the groundwork was made for ALCS and PLR to forge ahead. All these years later the society continues to work hand-in-hand with MPs and Peers to ensure that the voice of authors is heard. Parliamentarians form the All Party Writers Group (APWG) to champion authors’ concerns to government. ALCS supports them in
Spring-Summer 2022
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