May 22, 2018

ACP to honour Access Copyright at 2018 AGM

The Association of Canadian Publishers (ACP) is pleased to announce that Access Copyright will be presented with honorary lifetime membership at the association’s upcoming Annual General Meeting.

Since 1988, Access Copyright (formerly CANCOPY) has worked on behalf of Canadian publishers and creators to license their work to the education, government, and corporate sectors, and has distributed more than $440 million to rightsholders. By enabling content users to access content easily and efficiently, while also ensuring that publishers and creators are fairly paid for that use, Access Copyright provides essential infrastructure and legal support to the Canadian writing and publishing sector.

“Access Copyright has worked on behalf of independent publishers for decades, and ACP has relied on the collective to create and monitor a licensing system for what would otherwise be unsupervised, unmonetized, and unenforced copying of our works beyond legal limits,” said Glenn Rollans, ACP president. “Access Copyright is a truly essential organization for making our marketplace work; if it did not already exist, we would have to invent it. Through thick and thin, Access Copyright’s professional staff and volunteer board have pursued our interests and the interests of our sector, and along the way the organization has generated important revenues for its affiliates. We are pleased to be able to express our thanks to this hardworking and deserving organization, especially as it prepares to celebrate its thirtieth anniversary this summer.”

Honorary lifetime membership in ACP is presented to an individual or group that has made a significant contribution to the ACP and to the Canadian publishing industry. The award will be presented on June 5 in Montreal, at the ACP’s annual banquet, and will be accepted on behalf of Access Copyright by Cameron Macdonald, chair of the organization’s board of directors.