Dear AMICO Rights Committee:

At the AMICO Board Meeting in June, the Walker Art Center and the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego agreed to take the lead in developing a coordinated approach to contemporary artists rights. Charles Castle (MCSD) and David Galligan (WAC) are beginning to work on this issue now. What follows is copy of an email to David and Charles from DB and I, summarizing this issues as discussed to date.

Comments and suggestions welcome.

jt and David

Dear Charles and David,

We thought it might be useful to summarize current thinking on AMICO and Contemporary Artists Rights, to start the ball rolling towards a common strategy.

We seem to agree that we need:

* to excite the contemporary artists community about digital educational use of reproductions of their work [the artists' equivalent of the educational missons of museums] i.e. to convince them that it is good for them

* to ease the process of acquiring rights to contribute works 
to the AMICO Library by:
	- defining standard agreements for artists to sign 

	- working with artists rights societies (at least ARS and 
VAGA) to develop standard procedures, agreements and 
preferential terms
	- doing anything else that will make the process more 
routine and streamlined

BUT, throughout the AMICO members we don't have agreement on:

* whether museums will pay for rights
* whether AMICO could possibly share licensing fees [by 
distributing some portion of the fee it received, based on the 
proportion of contemporary works in the library divided by the 
proportion of works by a particular artist]
* whether we are willing to tolerate 'special' deals for
 particular artists.
* Whether AMICO institutions really want to ask for rights
 beyond those required by AMICO at the same time as asking for
 rights to licensed & controlled distribution
* whether artist/rights holders should be offered access to
 the AMICO Library as a 'payment' 
* who would discuss these things on behalf of AMICO and what 
process would be employed to ensure AMICO wide agreement (to
say nothing of who we should talk to 'on behalf' of the 
artists and how their agreement would get translated into a 
more widey accepted agreement]
* what tactics we want to use to get to agreements - beyond 
meeting with artists and their representatives.

We all agree that we need to be seen as talking with one voice in to the artistic community, which means working together prior to any public statement to identify a strategy, a best case, and fall back positions.

We seem to be moving towards a meeting of AMICO Directors/Rights administrators. When and where looks like the best bet?

jennifer and David