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.