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Hi, I’m Georgia Stitt. I’m the Chair of the Copyright Advocacy Committee. And we have just come up with a mission statement for our committee so I’m going to read that to you. “The Dramatists Guild Copyright Advocacy Committee is dedicated to educating users and owners of copyrighted material about their rights and best practices; advocating, on behalf of playwrights, composers and lyricists as specific violations arise and proactively raising awareness of copyright issues. In this way, we hope to build respect for copyright among educators, theater practitioners and audiences and further the cause of authors who rely on copyright.” Our committee has been around for I don’t know about a decade. But in the last year in particular, I think the most successful thing we did was we hosted Copyright Advocacy Month in September which included many videos made and posted by several of our members. And we hosted a webinar that was led by Katie Roland who is in the copyright office in Washington DC, the US Copyright Office. In partnership with the Dramatists Guild staff, we built out the Copyright Advocacy page on the website, making it easier to find the resources that you might need to advocate for yourself and protect your work. We’re building liaisons to other committees. Right now we started to see an overlap of purpose and intention. Specifically we’re working with the education committee, thinking about how material gets distributed when it’s in an educational setting. The music committee, the new media committee, which is basically the wild west right now, publishing and even political engagement. The emergence of the Case Act in particular has far-reaching implications for artists who are basically small business owners. And so in the next year, we are hoping to add a feature in the Dramatists Magazine that is a What Copyright Means to Me column with many, many different contributors. We’re going to support projects that get more scripts into libraries so people can check them out and read them instead of treating them illegally. We’re working on building a flowchart that helps our membership understand their rights and we are partnering with other organizations to have more of a presence on Capitol Hill in Washington DC. We welcome lots of new members, especially if you’re interested in these topics and it’s a great group of people. So thanks.


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