Copyright Licensing and Collection Agencies

There are a number of copyright collecting societies operating in Australia. These societies licence, collect and distribute royalties on behalf of the copyright owners they represent. There are societies that represent authors and publishers, composers and music publishers, visual artists, sound recording companies and owners of copyright in audio-visual materials. The main societies are set out below.

• Copyright Agency Limited (CAL)
  CAL is an Australian copyright management company that represents authors, journalists, visual artists, photographers and publishers to license the copying of their works to the general community. CAL also provides copyright clearances for books, articles, essays and artwork through its licences to copy.
• Screenrights
  Screenrights, formerly trading as the Audio-Visual Copyright Society, is a non profit copyright collecting society for producers, distributors, script writers, music copyright owners, rights owners in artistic works and sound recordings and other rightsholders in film and television.
• Vi$copy
  Vi$copy, the visual arts copyright collecting society, administers and distributes licence fees for the reproduction of artistic works in Australia. Members include new technology artists, photographers, printmakers, cartoonists, sculptors, illustrators, designers, craftspeople and other copyright owners of artistic works.
• Australasian Mechanical Copyright Owners' Society (AMCOS)
  AMCOS represents the interests of music publishers and their writers in Australia and New Zealand. AMCOS licenses a number of music reproduction rights for its members and distributes copyright royalties.
• Australasian Performing Right Association (APRA)
  APRA was established in 1926 to administer the exclusive rights given to music copyright owners by Commonwealth legislation to authorise the public performance and broadcast of their work and its transmission to subscribers of a cable service. A non-profit organisation, APRA licenses music users and forwards the licence fees to copyright owners in the form of royalties.
• Phonographic Performance Company of Australia (PPCA)
  PPCA is a national, non-government, non-profit organisation representing record companies and recording artists. Established in 1969, PPCA grants licences to anyone publicly playing sound recordings or music videos. Licence fees are distributed to recording artists, record companies and to a trust fund which gives grants for the encouragement of music and the performing arts.