The Screen Actors Guild announced a new online foreign royalties tracker, following a settlement deal with "Leave It to Beaver" star Ken Osmond in which it agreed to conduct an independent audit of its foreign royalties program.
Added to the guild's website Wednesday night, the tracker is the result of an extended legal battle over foreign royalties between the guild and “Leave it to Beaver” actor Ken Osmond. The guild agreed to add the tracker last month -- and to pay up to $300,000 in attorney’s fees incurred during the battle.
It gives members the ability to log in and see a full-view report of any foreign royalties collected on their behalf.
“This is one more way in which we are continuing to distribute funds to our members as quickly and efficiently as possible,” said SAG Deputy National Executive Director and General Counsel Duncan Crabtree-Ireland. “SAG is proud of its efforts to locate, claim and distribute foreign royalties for our members. We have distributed millions of dollars of royalty funds that would otherwise have gone unclaimed and been lost to them forever.”
The move did not come voluntarily.
TheWrap reported in 2008 that SAG had $25 million in unclaimed residual payments owed to 66,848 actors, both members and non-members of the union, and many of them very famous. The guild claimd they couldn't find those members, but launched a campaign to find them within a few weeks of the publication of TheWrap's story.
The foreign levy, or royalty, money involves taxes from foreign sales of blank and other cassettes and DVDs. The money had been stashed in accounts, quietly forgotten, while the guilds handed half of the proceeds over to the studios.
The Writers Guild, which had the same unpaid funds, settled for $30 million within days of TheWrap publishing embarrassing testimony from a whistleblower indicating the shredding of documents.
SAG did not disclose the size of the settlement. In August Crabtree-Ireland said the guild had paid out $7 million in unpaid royalties to to more than 70,000 individual performers that would otherwise have gone unclaimed and been lost to them forever.”
Here's the guild's announcement:
Screen Actors Guild Launches New Foreign Royalties Tracker
Giving Members Added Online Functionality
LOS ANGELES, (January 27, 2011) -- Screen Actors Guild's member service offerings just got another big boost with the online debut of the Guild’s Foreign Royalties Tracker.
SAG’s Foreign Royalties Tracker, an online search tool that launched on the Guild’s website last night, gives members the ability to log in and see a full-view report of any foreign royalties that may have been collected on their behalf. Not all members will have foreign royalties and thus will not show up in the Tracker. Those members who do have foreign royalties or who wish to find out if they do, can now log into the Tracker on the SAG website and check it out.
