The CSCS and How It Provides Additional Income for Writers
And what you need to do to collect it!
If you’ve written a movie that was produced in Canada and received distribution outside of North America, there’s a chance the Canadian Screenwriters Collection Society (CSCS), a division of the Writers Guild of Canada, has money for you.
Thanks to copyright laws in Europe and multiple other countries, authors of audiovisual works are entitled to compensation for what’s deemed ‘secondary uses’ of their works. These uses include penalties for the private, unauthorized copying of the film, the fees libraries and DVD rental stores pay for the rights to lend out copies of the film, and cable retransmission broadcasts. Basically, all stuff that you’d never know was happening to the movie you wrote if it weren’t for the CSCS.
This money, collected by the CSCS in the form of foreign levies, has nothing to do with what you were paid to write the screenplay or your residuals (if you were lucky enough to get some). And its availability is not limited to writers who are members of the Writers Guild of Canada. The society collects levies on all qualifying films, regardless of whether the writer is a member of a guild or not, and distributes that money, after taking a nominal administrative fee, back to the writer, in perpetuity.
However, the CSCS will only distribute the money they’ve collected for you if you become a member of CSCS.
That’s not really a big deal. There’s a one-time fee of $25 USD to join if you’re not already a member of the Writers Guild of Canada, and they typically just deduct the joining fee from the amount you’re owed. Acceptance to join CSCS is conditional on approval, which consists mostly of being able to prove that you were the writer or co-writer of the film.
Over the years, I’ve had several writers— typically my consulting clients who have gone on to have their screenplays produced— reach out to me after receiving a notice from CSCS, asking if it’s a scam. After all, it seems almost too good to be true that any organization would take the initiative to collect otherwise uncollectable monies for you without you even knowing.
Yes, it’s legit! And the more movies you write, the more money they collect.
Having written or co-written more than fifty movies that were shot in Canada during my career, I’ve been collecting their annual checks for decades, with checks (or ‘cheques’ if we want to spell it the Canadian way) often surpassing five figures. While it’s impossible to predict how much each check will be, it certainly serves as a nice bonus to supplement one’s income.
If you’re interested in finding out if CSCS is holding funds for you, here’s how to do it…
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