How Collective Licensing supports authors

Harry Boughton, Head of Operations, appeared on the latest episode of the SoA Advisory Clinic alongside ALCS‘s Richard Combes, for a deep dive into the world of collective licensing and what it means for authors.

The SoA Advisory Clinic is a limited podcast series, hosted by the Society of Authors, that discusses key industry topics, issues and challenges affecting authors today.

Following a talk at the 2024 Nielsen BookData Publisher Seminar event, Harry was invited onto the Podcast to explain and simplify everything that CLA does. He shares expert insight around how CLA’s licences work in practice, how reuse is monitored, how payments are allocated and how we as an organisation continue to adapt to new ways of content use.

“We are a regulated not-for-profit organisation, who licence organisations to lawfully use, copy and share text and image-based content. We then take the licence revenue that we generate from those sales and distribute that to authors, publishers and visual artists, which essentially ensures that both business and organisations using the content are doing so lawfully. It then also ensures that fair compensation for the rightsholders of those copied works, which invariably support the UK’s creative economy and creative ecosystem”

– Harry Boughton

You can listen to the full episode below (Start at 20:30 for Harry Boughton).