Robert Taylor

I am a copyright lawyer and a partner at Gunnercooke LLP.  I have also worked  as a screenwriter, TV producer and author. I have been advising creative people on copyright contracts and disputes for over 21 years.  I wrote Copyright Made Easy to share some of these experiences. 

I wrote episodes  of BBC TV’s ChuckleVision back in the 1990’s – getting the seriousness of university studies out of my system with a healthy dose of slapstick. More recently, I was one of the creators and producers of Monty and Co, a live-action comedy drama for pre-schoolers, featuring the misadventures of a hysterical wallaby.  Series one was bought by the BBC’s CBeebies channel and launched in 2021.

Creative rights have always been extremely important to me, as time and time again I have seen creative people get ripped off or lose control their work.   This led me to get involved with campaigns for creative rights.  I was the Chair of the writers’ union, The Writers’ Guild of Great Britain for 3 years, and later the President of the Federation of Screenwriters in Europe between 2015 and 2019. In this role I represented more than 7,500 screenwriters and campaigned for remuneration rights to be included in copyright law. 

As a lawyer, campaigner and creative myself, I have long felt that creatives were not considered important in copyright law, when without creative people the media industry would have nothing to sell.  

I often come across the view from creatives, that concern for their rights is somehow unworthy, lowering or discreditable, but from Dickens to Dostoevsky, Samuel Beckett to Sonny Bono, creatives who compromised for no-one have disagreed and fought for their rights. 

Every creator should understand copyright and in Copyright made Easy  I try to do exactly what the title says.  I use examples from films, books, painting, photography and music to tell the story, and avoiding often impenetrable legal cases or boring legislation, to make copyright as fun and accessible as possible.