Sign up, sign up for your rights

AT A FEW HOURS' notice, Daffydd Wyn Phillips of the Authors' Licensing and Collecting Society gave the December branch meeting an introduction to ALCS' work.

Phil Sutcliffe gave an impassioned speech from the floor on why ALCS is crucial to freelances in the future:

ALCS, through minute developments in programming and accountancy, is a warrior (and a worrier too) on our behalf -- our best hope of guarding against the theft of our work. This is actually a real fight, a part of the nature of solidarity amongst any group of workers any time and any where. The Norwegian equivalent of ALCS, KOPINOR, collects £1M a year just on the photocopying of material in Norwegian -- and we work in the international language... if our material was only photocopied as much as in Norway, we would get £6M a year...

It's about our living, our property, our rights -- and it's also about improving the quality of journalism in this country by making it a profession through which you can make a decent living as opposed to scraping around for whatever fag-ends and bits of vegetable you can find.

By mid-December, 770 NUJ freelance members had taken advantage of the offer of free associate membership of ALCS.

That's a good response, but it leaves, the Freelance guesses, at least 5000 more members who could benefit. That includes photographers -- sign up on the one form, and arrangements with the graphical collecting society DACS are automatic.

Return the form now. If you've lost the form, fax 020 7278 1812 or email to request another.