We collect copyright licence fees for the copying and sharing text and images and distribute the fees to copyright owners (primarily writers, artists and publishers).
We are appointed by the Attorney General to manage the Statutory Licence Scheme for Education . We are also appointed by the Copyright Tribunal to manage the Statutory Licence Scheme for the Commonwealth, State and Territory Governments. And we are appointed by the Minister for the Arts to manage the Artists Resale Royalty scheme.
In addition, we issue licences to commercial business across sectors like Banking & Finance, Energy, Property and Media Monitoring Organisations and manage end-to-end Visual Arts Licences and return these licence fees to our creator members too.
We have 40,000 members who are primarily writers, artists, publishers and surveying firms. It is free to join.
We also have agreements with International Affiliates to license the use of foreign content in Australia, and collect licence fees for Australian content used overseas.
Find out more about Our Heritage.
We are responsible to:
- the Attorney General under our appointment to manage the statutory licence schemes for the education and government sectors
- the Minister for the Arts under our appointment to manage the artists resale royalty scheme
- our members under the Corporations Act.
- people for whom we hold licence fees under trust obligations.
In addition:
- the Copyright Tribunal can review licence fees and other licence terms.
- we report annually to the Code Reviewer (a former Federal Court judge) on our compliance with the Collecting Societies Code of Conduct.
what we don’t do
- contact APRA|AMCOS if you want to copy, record, perform or play someone else’s music in public, and PPCA (as well) if you want to play recorded music in public
- contact Screenrights if you are an educational institution that records broadcasts for education, or a creator whose work has been broadcast
- we can’t give you legal advice, but you may be able to get advice from Australian Society of Authors (ASA) if you are a member of the ASA, or the The Australian Copyright Council.