03 June 2011
Posted in General

The Annual General Meeting of the Guild will take place on Friday 24 June 2011 from 10.30am to 5.00pm at the Free Word Centre, 60 Farringdon Road, London EC1R 3GA.

The AGM is your opportunity to raise any point or ask any question about the performance of the Guild during the past year. It also decides on changes to the Rules. Motions for debate include changes to the way we appoint Guild Trustees and Craft Committee chairs, condemnation of cuts in arts funding and the BBC, and a call for a campaign against Bafta’s policy of relegating writers to the “craft section” of its annual TV awards. 

Our featured speaker this year will be Jayne Kirkham, a member of the Guild’s Executive Council, who will talk about the Save Kids TV campaign. Jayne has travelled the length of the country and attended all the major political party conferences to raise awareness of this crucial issue.

As a money-saving measure the Guild will not provide lunch this year. There are numerous cafés, restaurants, pubs, sandwich counters and open-air food stalls within a few minutes’ walk of the Free Word Centre, but if you have special dietary requirements you may be well advised to bring your own food.

The full agenda and the Guild’s Annual Report and Accounts are being posted to you with the latest issue of UK Writer – they should arrive in a few days’ time. All the relevant documents can also be downloaded below:

• AGM Agenda
• Annual Report 2010-2011
• Rule Book

The AGM is open to all Writers’ Guild members: Full Members and Life Members are entitled to attend and vote; Candidate, Student and Honorary Members are entitled to attend and speak but not to vote; Affiliate Members are entitled to attend and speak but may vote only on the accounts.

We hope many members will be able to attend and we look forward to seeing you on Friday 24 June 2011. 

18 May 2011
Posted in General

Bernie Corbett responds to the latest government-commissioned review of intellectual property, Digital Opportunity, by Ian Hargreaves

This one was going to be different. Unlike the stillborn Gowers Review, unlike the arthritic staggerings of the Intellectual Property Office, unlike the endless procrastinations of the European Commission, unlike the opulent time-wasting of the World Intellectual Property Organisation . . . the slightly distinguished former newspaper editor Ian Hargreaves was going to sort out all the intricacies and frustrations of copyright law in his, er, five-month review.

It was predictable that the result would be a feeble non-event, and so it has proved. The abandonment of US-style “fair use” is welcome, although hardly earth-shattering since everyone except David Cameron always knew it was impossible under existing EU laws.

Whatever he is a professor of, Hargreaves demonstrates that it is not history or law with his ignorant jibe that today’s copyright laws are 300 years old, archaic and “obstruct innovation and economic growth”. In fact the present international copyright regime, to which the UK is and will remain fully signed up, is a little over a century old but has proved marvelously adaptable and with simple, logical updates has taken in its stride the development of the gramophone, cinema, radio, television and home recording.

It will prove equally stable and adaptable to the digital age, and in fact all that Hargreaves is proposing are a few tweaks to enable that process. Hargreaves himself concedes, a little grudgingly, that “sales and profitability levels in most creative business sectors appear to be holding up” in the worst recession since the Wall Street crash.

11 April 2011
Posted in General

A transcription of a podcast interview with Guild General Secretary Bernie Corbett outlining new agreements in TV and radio, and looking at current issues in books and film

You can listen to the podcast online, via iTunes or as an app for the iPhone, iPad or Android

Tom Green: Hello, and welcome to this podcast from the Writers’ Guild. I’m a writer and the Guild’s online editor. With me today is Bernie Corbett, who is the General Secretary of the Writers’ Guild, and we’re going to talk about some of the current issues affecting writers in the UK that the Guild is involved with in some way. Bernie I wonder if we can start by talking about the latest news on the Google Book Settlement? 

Bernie Corbett: Yes, it doesn’t come as a great surprise that the Google Book Settlement has got completely bogged down in the American courts system. I and many others have predicted this for quite a long time and it has now happened and it’s anybody’s guess whether a settlement will ever come out at the other side. 

Broadly speaking, what happened several years ago now is that Google started doing scans of thousands and thousands, probably millions, of old books in various libraries across America and some other countries, with a view to making out-of-print books available again, which is a pretty good idea. Unfortunately, they didn’t ask for anybody’s permission and they didn’t offer any money so the American Authors’ Guild and the American publishers, when they realised what was going on, sued Google and tried to get them to stop what they were doing. In the end a settlement was negotiated which would have allowed Google to carry on with its project, make the books available, but on certain conditions, which included paying $60 to the author of every book that they put out, and further payments depending on the number of people who downloaded or read those books, and they would also have had to remove books from anybody that objected, and a worldwide system was set up to catalogue all the books and find out whether people wanted them withdrawn or where to send the payments and all that. 

21 March 2011
Posted in General

The Writers Guild of America, west (WGAW) has concluded a tentative agreement with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers.

In a letter to members the WGAW stated that: 'The three-year deal features significant gains in contributions to our pension fund, improves payments in Pay TV residuals, increases our minimums, and takes steps to address important workplace issues for screen and television writers.'