Picture of Owen Atkinson

Welcome to the autumn edition of ALCS News, marking the beginning of a busy period in the ALCS calendar.

We have recently made the second of our distributions for 2011, paying out a net amount of £6.4million (£7.1m gross) to 17,317 writers. These payments included Estonian PLR and cable retransmission fees for the first time. For details of the next distribution, please see News and views.

This year’s ALCS Annual General Meeting will be held at the George Hotel in Edinburgh on Thursday 24 November. This will be the second AGM we have held outside London, and I do hope to see many of you there. Further details can also be found in News and views.

The All Party Writers Group (APWG) will be hosting their winter reception on 6 December, at which the annual Educational Writers’ Award, sponsored by ALCS and administered by the Society of Authors (SoA), will also be presented.

In the last issue of ALCS News I mentioned that the ALCS Board has been considering what can be done to support writers, affiliated organisations and charities in these difficult economic times. I’m pleased to announce that at this year’s AGM we will be launching our new initiative ‘Support and Sponsorship’. More information about this venture will be available on the ALCS website shortly.

On the subject of the ALCS Board, I’d also like to welcome new member Paul Powell, who recently joined as a non-executive Director. Paul is a comedy writer for TV and radio, and has contributed the First person feature to this issue.

Earlier this year we welcomed the Government’s response to the much anticipated review by Ian Hargreaves, Digital Opportunity: A Review of Intellectual Property and Growth, in particular its acknowledgement of the vital role that the UK intellectual property (IP) framework plays in supporting the economy. We were pleased that overall the Government supported the review’s recommendations, which are addressed more fully in Rights and licensing news. We do, however, still have some concerns and we look at what this all means for writers in our flagship feature ©opyright: the state of play.

Finally, it’s the end of an era as we say goodbye to the printed edition of ALCS News. As part of our push for more efficient ways of working, and to help us adhere to our environmental policy, we will be sending all future issues of ALCS News to Members in email format. The magazine will of course continue to be available online at www.alcs.co.uk/news, where you can access both current and past editions.

We now plan to produce ALCS News more frequently, making it a more current and up-to-date online resource. If you’ve only just logged onto the online version, we hope that you will grow to enjoy it as much as the paper one. If you don’t currently subscribe to an e-mail copy of ALCS News and would like to do so in future, please let us know at communications@alcs.co.uk

With best wishes,

Owen Atkinson
Chief Executive of ALCS