Last Wednesday, at our Annual General Meeting, the Copyright Agency reported a distribution of $115m to members in the 2015-16 financial year, with a positive expansion in licensing, particularly among corporates, media intelligence companies and colleges.
The Copyright Agency’s CEO, Adam Suckling told members at the AGM that the company had distributed an average of $100m a year to members over the past decade.
Key highlights for the past financial year are below.
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Digital licensing expands Copyright Agency revenue
with a $115m return to members
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The Copyright Agency continued to support Australian creativity through the Cultural Fund, with more than $2m allocated to the creative community in 2015-16. This included grants to 66 arts organisations, 31 authors and artists, and 8 Fellowships. See details of 2016 Fellowship winners here.
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Additionally, we continued to manage the Resale Royalty scheme for artists. In the past 12 months, we've paid $612,000 to 350 artists and since the scheme began in 2010, we've generated $4.3 million for artists.
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In education, LearningField – which provides high schools with subscription access to over 12,000 chapters of digital textbooks from major Australian publishers – partnered with new technology platform, VitalSource.
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Similarly, our website to help teach Australian stories, Reading Australia, continued to grow. It now hosts 120 in-depth resources plus 80 essays from prominent Australians. It also celebrated its third birthday.
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We negotiated new agreements with media intelligence company Isentia for their use of media content, which included licensing new digital forms of use by their customers. As well, commercial licensing revenue grew by 12% as more Australian corporations recognised the importance of a copyright licence for best practice governance and seamless information sharing.
We also teamed up with APRA AMCOS, ARIA, PPCA and Early Childhood Australia to provide a simple licensing solution to early learning providers.
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Keep Creators Creating
What is it that fuels the creative economy and keeps creators creating? What is it that drives the new knowledge economy? What is it that educates the next generation of thinkers and doers? What is the one critical element no creative economy can do without? Creative content. And that’s where the Copyright Agency, and our partner Viscopy, steps in. Watch more.
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About the Copyright Agency
The Copyright Agency connects users and creators of content, providing licences for the use of copyright material such as text, images, art and survey plans. We manage the educational and government licences for the use of text and images, as well as the resale royalty scheme for artists (by Government appointment). Our members include writers, artists, surveyors and publishers. Membership is free. www.copyright.com.au
About the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund
The Cultural Fund is the philanthropic arm of the Copyright Agency, providing support to individuals and organisations to run projects that will enrich Australian culture through publishing, writing and the visual arts. www.copyright.com.au/culturalfund
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