Off the back of launching MyCopyright in 2019, Copyright Licensing New Zealand's plans for 2020 included emphasis on getting licensing fees out to rightsholders faster than ever before. We have the technology and we want to use it to benefit you and your business!
The pandemic situation, including the economic impact on creative industries, further reinforces the need for us to make distribution payments of both local and overseas revenue more regularly. As a first step, payments of international revenue will be actioned this month, rather than in June.
Following the international payments, we will turn our attention to the payment of local revenue and are working through how we can do this in a series of smaller batches, rather through the usual end-of-year cycle. While we’re doing what we can to make this as fast as possible, completing the MyCopyright process will ensure that all future distributions get to you promptly.
MyCopyright
If you have already signed up to MyCopyright and you have licensing fees due to you, simply sign-in by following this link. Once you've worked through the notification, uploading your invoice will trigger the payment. If you haven’t completed the MyCopyright setup, you’ll receive instructions on how to do this in the coming week, including how to claim the funds due.
Outstanding payments
There are still a few rightsholders that have yet to claim their licensing fees from previous distributions. If you have previously been notified, we encourage you to sign-in to MyCopyright and claim these payments (if you've forgotten your password, you can reset it on the same page). If you have questions regarding this, please don't hesitate to email our team here mycopyright@copyright.co.nz.
Education Licence Holders
With our education licence holders, we’re responding to requests for flexibility as best we can to help to minimise the disruption to student learning. We’ve also commenced discussions with the Ministry of Education about what schools will need should partial or total shutdown be required.
Cultural Fund
Our Cultural Fund grants activity will take place as usual and you can find the dates for these on our website here.
Education Awards
In 2020 the CLNZ Education Awards were also due to be held and we were in the process of considering how we would fit these into our work programme as the pandemic broke. We have made the decision to focus our team’s efforts on getting funds out to authors and publishers along with a project that will explore a revised methodology for the distribution of schools licensing revenue. We'll share more on this later in the year.
Survey for Writers
Writers' incomes are being impacted by cancellation of events due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Together with NZ Society of Authors we are pulling together information to assist with our lobbying to government on the lost income that writers are confronted with. If you are able to quantify lost income and other lost opportunities from cancelled events it will be invaluable. Information will be collated from the responses received, and no individuals names will be made public. If you can, we encourage you to >>take part in this survey >>
During all of this we are, of course, looking after our people here in our Kotahitanga offices. We moved to a flexible work model in 2019 and have the tools to maintain our service standards and team engagement from anywhere. We’re also in constant communication with the NZ Society of Authors and Publishers Association of NZ about the needs of the industry and how we may be able to support these.
These are difficult times and we are focused on working with the New Zealand publishing industry in ways that help to address the challenges facing us.
Ngā mihi nui
Paula Browning
Chief Executive
Photo by Paul Skorupskas on Unsplash