Time to tell the world about unfair contracts

THE EU wants to know about the contracts that are imposed on you. Getting as many submissions as possible about the scope of unfair contracts and their effects on journalists' earnings is absolutely vital to getting action taken to rein them in.

Please take a quarter-hour to complete the relevant questionnaire at the address below. Or more than one, if more than one applies to you. (We have been made awaret that it's quite hard to report earnings from stock photography. Please take a stab at it...)

TIP: Where the survey form invites you to select all the options that apply in answer to a question, hold down your Control key while clicking on all that you want to select, then let go.

The deadline is 30 May 2015.

The NUJ will of course make anonymised results of the survey that it recently conducted available to the EU Commission. It's important to do this one too (that one helped persuade them to do this, official, one.)

Privacy guarantee

Here is the message from the organistion commissioned to conduct the survey:

Europe Economics and the Institute for Information Law of the University of Amsterdam are undertaking a study on the remuneration of writers, journalists, authors of publications in scientific/academic journals, translators, photographers, illustrators and designers (collectively referred to as authors) for the European Commission.

Part of our approach is to conduct an online survey of relevant authors. The results of this study are likely to influence the legislative framework and EC policies that govern the remuneration of authors and this survey gives your members the chance to contribute to the research.

The survey should only take 10-15 minutes to complete, and that the responses are anonymous (neither Europe Economics, the Institute for Information Law of the University of Amsterdam nor DG Internal Market will be able to identify the individuals that have responded). In addition the surveyors will treat the individual responses collected as confidential and they will not be shared with any third parties. Only aggregated data will be used in our report.

© Mike Holdernesss