Allison Demas
Photo: Robert Taylor

Allison’s law

By DEBBIE JACOB

HER work is the world of entertainment but she finds little time to indulge in being entertained.

Attorney Allison Demas is the first woman president of the Copyright Organisation of Trinidad and Tobago (COTT). Outside of COTT, her clients include Shadow, Sparrow, 3-Canal, and Mungal Patasar. 

Demas, who is married to attorney Gavin Simonette, says she rarely has time to fit any form of entertainment into her personal life —unless it’s the entertainment needs of her three-year-old daughter, Aisha, whose name means “life”.

Protecting the rights of entertainers is a full-time commitment for Demas and that’s not likely to change even when she resigns her position at COTT at the end of this year to pursue a six-month diploma course in Intellectual Property Rights at Franklin Pierce Law Centre, New Hampshire.

“America is the biggest market for our music so it is important we understand how the legal system there operates,” says Demas in an interview at her office in Trinity Chambers. It is a small office filled with legal books, stacks of legal files, and boxes of confiscated illegal software material.

(She’s also the legal counsel for the Business Software Alliance, a trade association for software with a BSA hot line and team of local investigators who deter.) 

Demas didn’t set out to do copyright and entertainment law when she earned her first degree in law at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill or even when she pursued a master’s degree at the London School of Economics (LSE) and began to work at a law firm in London.

“One day, quite by accident, I got a case in which the client was an Argentine film producer. I found the case fascinating,” says Demas.

By the time she returned to Trinidad and Tobago in 1994, she was passionate about copyright and entertainment law.

“I’m not creative, but I always admired people who were creative, and I saw this as a way to support our creative people,” she says.

By 1995, Demas had joined the Board of COTT and in 1999 she was president.

“My predecessor Alvin Daniell said it is a thankless job, and it is, in a way, but it offers a lot of satisfaction internally,” says Demas. “It is satisfying to ensure that people who create original material are compensated, recognised, appreciated and their rights are upheld.”

While head of COTT, Demas decided to increase communication by creating more transparency for what COTT does. She created a quarterly newsletter, a yearbook and encouraged the development of a website (www.cott.org.tt). She also tried to educate the public about the role of COTT.

“People have some serious misconceptions about COTT and its role,” says Demas. “COTT is a collecting agency that acquires rights in copyright music, licences the use of such music, collects royalties and distributes to composers and publishers of music. It is not a policing agency that deals with pirating.”

Still, pirating—the actual theft of intellectual property—is something that bothers Demas.

“I do feel a big sense of frustration about pirating. It’s high time we stop talking about the evil of pirating and do something about it because it’s a serious crime. We need to sensitise magistrates and judges and police that it’s a theft. It’s a serious matter that affects the livelihood of our artistes, composers, songwriters, music publishers and record producers.
Demas is also interested in addressing the disparity between the amount of foreign music played on our airwaves as opposed to the amount of local music played. But there are other discrepancies that have caught Demas’s eyes.

“When I went to the eastern Caribbean, I was amazed at the amount of Trinidadian music that was being played, because the money for performing rights was not coming back here.”

Then there was the challenge of collecting money from foreign markets: North America, Europe and Japan, a challenge that still exists.

Another major accomplishment under Demas’s leadership at COTT is the creation of the Caribbean Copyright Link (CCL) which is a regional service centre for copyright organisations in the Caribbean.

“Even though most Caribbean countries have been politically independent since the 60s and 70s, they’ve operated under colonial copyright systems, says Demas. It’s hardly surprising that Demas would consider a regional approach. She considers herself to be a Caribbean woman. Her mother is from Jamaica and her father, the late William Demas, a champion of Caribbean unity and former president of the Caribbean Development Bank and Governor of the Central Bank of Trinidad & Tobago, took his family to live in Jamaica, Guyana and Barbados. Demas returned to Trinidad and Tobago to do her O-levels and A-levels at Bishop Anstey High School, known for its tradition of nurturing strong women with a social conscience. 

Demas has certainly made a valuable contribution to Trinidad and Tobago and the Caribbean, but there’s a lot more to be done in the entertainment field, she says.

“All of these issues about entertainment and copyright are relatively new for us in the Caribbean, but it’s a fascinating field that is going to become more and more important,” she says, adding, “We’re lagging behind right now, but one day we’ll catch up.”

Demas is dedicated to achieving that goal. 

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