March 19, 1999

From: David Bearman
To: Jennifer Trant, Executive Director, AMICO

Subject: Discussion with Darla Decker, ARS, at Museums and the Web '99

On Sunday March 14, I met briefly with Darla Decker about the status of AMICO's request to ARS to define a framework for a contract to use ARS licensed materials in the AMICO Library.

Darla said that ARS had circulated our proposed framework to its European partners and that the rights organizations in France and the UK were already working within somewhat different frameworks and preferred those. I suggested that AMICO would be willing to look at those frameworks and perhaps we could find them acceptable, but asked for some details.

Darla thought the stumbling blocks might be the total number of works by a given artist within the AMICO library, or perhaps the total number from any given museum, and the percentage of the AMICO Library that was represented by the work of one contemporary artist. We talked about the likely number of works in the AMICO Library next year (c.40,000) and the possible percentage that might be contemporary (given timing less than 10%). We also talked about the likely number next year (c.75,000) and the percentage that might be contemporary if a blanket deal with ARS could be made soon (c.15%). Given these numbers, Darla felt that her colleagues might accept a framework that promised no more that 1%, or perhaps 0.5% of the AMICO Library in any year could be the works of a single contemporary artist (at 0.5% of 40,000 this would mean no more than 200 by any single artist net year, and no more than 375 by a single artist the following year. I said that I felt that in principle we could administer such limits by telling members that they could help increase the limits by increasing the overall number of works in the AMICO Library. She will pursue concrete agreements from her colleagues.

On a second issue, the administration of our royalty payment, Darla asked if we could give them annually an accounting for our royalty payment based on the amount due to each artist. It appears they do not want to distribute to their members based on use, but only on the simple proportion of the library that the members works comprise, multiplied by the royalty terms. Given that the way we would need to validate to ARS or another rights agency the total amount of royalty that we owed to them would be to add the separate royalties from each artist or estate they represented, I agreed we could do this.

Darla asked us to again provide her with figures on the projected overall size of the library for the next five years. Meanwhile she will pursue getting a framework in place for our agreement. She agreed that both they and we want to avoid paperwork as much as possible given the very modest amount of money we are speaking about.