Not Sure about Voting in the US? Consider the EU Directive and Authors

By the time you get our next edition of The Hot Sheet, we’ll be writing it from either a Clintonian or Trumpian America. We encourage you to vote, especially if things appear to be going well without your ballot. And we emphasize that, of course, because voter complacency played a large role in the results of the late-June Brexit referendum that shocked the world with what now are plans for the UK to leave the European Union.

That’s the source of a certain irony now: author advocates in the UK today find themselves encouraging their countrymen to support an EU directive to reform the marketplace for copyright—a move that will benefit authors, but may be ratified only after it’s too late for authors in the UK.

What has caught the eye of many has been a ringing quote on copyright questions from the EU’s president, Jean-Claude Juncker, as part of his State of the Union address: “I want journalists, publishers, and authors to be paid fairly for their work, whether it is made in studios or living rooms, whether it is disseminated offline or online, whether it is published via a copying machine or commercially hyperlinked on the web.”

That statement is appreciated, as might be expected, by the main UK author advocacy organization, the Society of Authors. In an article at the society’s site, its president, author Philip Pullman, points to two safeguards in current proposed copyright legislation in the EU. He writes:

• “Transparency: a right to regular, timely, adequate and sufficient information on the exploitation of [authors’] works and performances from those to whom they have licensed or transferred their rights, including details of modes of exploitation, revenues generated, and remuneration due. This right will apply even if copyright has been assigned and will allow authors to assess how their work has been used.
• “The so-called ‘bestseller clause’: a right to claim additional, appropriate remuneration if the contractual remuneration [from a publisher] is disproportionately low compared to the subsequent revenues and benefits derived from the exploitation of the works or performances. One area this could have a substantial impact is in educational publishing, where publishers are increasingly paying authors only a low flat fee. This clause would help avoid current practice, where an author typically receives no further payment even if the book later becomes a highly successful curriculum textbook used in every school.”

Like the Authors Guild in the States, the Society of Authors is leading the way in the UK on publishing-contract reform. Society chief executive Nicola Solomon joins Pullman in hailing the European directive’s provisions for authors, saying in part: “We believe these provisions will help avoid unfair practices that currently prevent authors making a living from writing. We will be pressing the UK Government to implement these clauses without delay.”

The devil is in that word delay, however. The society estimates that implementation of such provisions could be a couple of years after adoption by EU member states, or around the year 2020—by which time the UK will likely have left the EU because of that June Brexit referendum.

Bottom line: The Society of Authors, as Solomon writes, is intent on seeing these author-supportive provisions through. Solomon writes: “Although this is likely to be past the time that Britain has left the EU, we will be strongly pressing for these provisions to be adopted into domestic legislation at the earliest opportunity.”