TT Promoters Association takes legal action

The TT Promoters Association (TTPA) have initiated legal action to begin the process of standardising the staging of events.

TTPA's advocate Paige deLeon, at a press conference at the Queen's Park Oval, last week, said legal letters were sent to three copyright management organisations: the Copyright Collection Organisation (TTCO), Awesome Copyright of TT and the Copyright Organisation (COTT).

“The en­vi­ron­ment in Trinidad is, with­out ques­tion, the worst, most dif­fi­cult en­vi­ron­ment for any op­er­a­tor to work in," she said.

She de­scribed the sit­u­a­tion as “un­ten­able.”

DeLeon said the CMOs are organisations which collect copyrights fees on behalf of artists and musicians.

“These letters are to ask the CMOs for a standardise response to the questions we ask: who are your members, what rights do you represents, what is the formula for asking us to pay for these particular things?

"There is no stan­dard. The goal­post keeps shift­ing all the time. Every five min­utes some­thing’s dif­fer­ent. We nev­er know what we’re go­ing to get. As you can ap­pre­ci­ate, in any en­ter­prise, if I can’t pre­dict, with some de­gree of cer­tain­ty, what my costs are go­ing to be then it be­comes al­most im­pos­si­ble for me to make any kind of pre­dic­tion on what to spend, how to spend the mon­ey, and then it caus­es a col­lapse in my in­ter­nal fi­nan­cial en­vi­ron­ment," she said.

DeLeon said the association was formed primarily to represent and lobby for the interest of people who host all types of events in TT.

She said the association was in dire need of specific information about how CMOs interact with the event entertainment industry and whose rights they protect.

“As you know there has been a protracted and very public squabble between all of the CMOs. We are always told if we don’t do certain things they would shut our event down. We have had this consistent problem with everybody threating to shut our business, our industry, down.”

DeLeon said in addition to the letters, the association started with the CMOs and will be taking similar action with all other stakeholders in the industry.

It is her hope that the challenges of the association are considered and addressed and the three entities which received the legal letters "release information and treat with it in a very straight forward and transparent way to move forward."

"To sti­fle the pro­mot­ers is to al­so sti­fle the so­ca artiste, it’s to sti­fle the cre­ative artis­tic per­son who does the set, it’s to sti­fle the man who cooks the food, it’s to sti­fle the per­son who sews the cos­tumes for the pro­mo girls," he said.

"It is because of these events that many artistes, craftsmen, entrepreneurs, are all able to derive a living. We understand what our contributions are to the national landscape not just the economy. We understand how important it is for us to continue to function and how many people depend upon us.”

She said there was no specific formula for calculating how many police officers or fire officers the industry get or how much money they have to pay COTT.

"The problem with that is there is no standard. The goalpost keeps shifting all the time. Every five minutes something is different,"deLeon said.