COTT CARNIVAL 2004 PAYOUT SHOWS 300 PERCENT INCREASE

DESPITE numerous challenges facing the Copyright Organisa-tion of Trinidad and Tobago (COTT) in collection of royalties and from increasingly brazen music pirates, the organisation’s receivables for Carnival 2004 show a whopping increase of more than 300 percent over the $131, 961 collected for the comparable 2003 period. The biggest ever payout for this collection period began on December 1 and continues daily at its Jerningham Avenue, Belmont office.

The payments represent revenue over the period December 2003 to March of this year. This is COTT’s third royalty distribution for 2004.  In the first tranche, paid last April, more than $1.3 million was shared among the organisation’s 1,000 plus members for work aired between January and June 2003, while the second issue of $2,888,601 was disbursed in respect of  July to December last year. “COTT has been able to realise significant increases in collections due to the vigilance of our field officers plus a number of new systems and mechanisms put into place over the past two years,” said CEO Allison Demas. “And this is in the face of a number of uphill challenges confronting us as we attempt to maximise potential income from the use/licensing of our members’ intellectual property.

“Once again, ACP Winston Cooper has been among those police officers embracing the crusade to put music pirates on the run and although his team has scored several successes in this regard during 2004, we are heartened by news that scrutiny and action will be beefed up and sustained throughout the 2005 Carnival season. “Among our larger astonishments in this context is a move by another body to convert the pirates into what they call ‘entrepreneurs,’ encouraging and convincing these thieves to operate with impunity on the flawed premise that there is some legality to their counterfeiting operations. We shall be watching this development and will take swift action where it impinges on the rights of our membership,” Demas said.

COTT president Christophe Grant, himself a prolific composer, said: “2004 has answered a lot of our cries for more local daily content — particularly on radio — with the coming on stream of stations owned and operated by some of our more enterprising members, who have dedicated their operations to the promulgation of local music exclusively, among them 90.1 WACK FM, 91.9FM TRINI BASHMENT and importantly, the GAYELLE-TV network. “As far as State-support for our efforts goes, we are pleased to see The Copyright Act of 1997 once again before parliament for amendments with a view to making it easier for the police to enforce the law,” Grant said. “COTT is therefore looking positively into the New Year, confident we will get much closer to our goal of providing an even more efficient royalty collection and distribution service to our members in 2005.”