Clinique juridique des artistes de Montreal (CJAM) welcomes you!
If you’re an artist, you know, you need to be a little bit of an entrepreneur to get your bills paid. In fact, to earn a living, artists need to not only be skilled at their craft but they need to be on top of dozens of other issues that have nothing to do with a paint brush, camera, note book or musical instrument. Many of these extra issues are legal ones. Unfortunately legal help is often expensive or otherwise unavailable to the artistic community.
This is why we’ve founded the Clinique juridique des artistes de Montreal. CJAM is the effort of a group of community-minded individuals (law students, academics, legal professionals and other volunteers) working to establish a legal clinic for Montreal’s artists.
A legal clinic is a place where people get free legal information. Our clinic will be designed to give this information to artists and arts organizations that do not have the means to acquire the services of a lawyer. For example, our volunteers will be able to help artists understand the basics of copyright and licensing law. CJAM will not, in most cases, get involved in major litigation or as an intervener in appeal cases. We are mostly there to keep the artistic community informed. We want to help artists make sense of the legal and business issues that affect their work. Issues that can sometimes be difficult – and expensive – to understand.
