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A copyright agency is a not-for-profit organisation which sets royalty rates, administers copyright registration databases, and issues interpretations of copyright statutes. Copyright is a kind of intellectual property concept and legislation which protects the original expression of ideas. Creators can use it to manage how their content is reproduced.
The core function of the copyright agency is to set and issue licences to users of copyright-protected material, collect licence revenue and distribute these as royalties money collected fairly and equitably to copyright owners and creators. While some copyright agencies may also act as copyright collection societies, not all have that authority, and many copyright collection societies are only authorised by the government to manage schemes on their behalf.
They think that creators and publishers should receive a fair reward when their work is re-used. The way to ensure this is to issue licences to organisations that want to copy and re-use their published work. The licence fees collected are then passed on to the copyright owners - the authors, publishers and visual artists - that they represent.
Any organisation photocopying, scanning or digitally reproducing material from copyright publications will usually require a licence to ensure legal compliance. The licences help to reduce the risk and potential cost of copyright infringement. This requirement applies to organisations in the business, education, public or charitable sector.
Copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive right to make copies of a creative work, usually for a limited time. The creative work may be in a literary, artistic, educational, or musical form. Copyright is intended to protect the original expression of an idea in the form of a creative work, but not the idea itself. A copyright is subject to limitations based on public interest considerations, such as the fair use doctrine in the United States.
Copyrights can either be licensed or assigned by the owner of the copyright. A copyright collective is a non-governmental body created by copyright law or private agreement which licenses copyrighted works on behalf of the authors and engages in collective rights management. Copyright societies track all the events and venues where copyrighted works are used and ensure that the copyright holders listed with the society are remunerated for such usage. The copyright society publishes its own tariff scheme on its websites and collects a nominal administrative fee on every transaction.
A performance rights organisation (PRO), also known as a performing rights society, provides intermediary functions, particularly collection of royalties, between copyright holders and parties who wish to use copyrighted works publicly in locations such as shopping and dining venues. Legal consumer purchase of works, such as buying CDs from a music store, confer private performance rights. PROs usually only collect royalties when use of a work is incidental to an organisation's purpose. Royalties for works essential to an organisation's purpose, such as theaters and radio, are usually negotiated directly with the rights holder.
PRS for Music Limited is a British music copyright collective, made up of two collection societies: the Mechanical-Copyright Protection Society (MCPS) and the Performing Right Society (PRS). It undertakes collective rights management for musical works on behalf of its 140,000 members. PRS for Music was formed in 1997 following the MCPS-PRS Alliance. In 2009, PRS and MCPS-PRS Alliance realigned their brands and became PRS for Music.
A royalty is a payment made by one party to another that owns a particular asset, for the right to ongoing use of that asset. Royalties are typically agreed upon as a percentage of gross or net revenues derived from the use of an asset or a fixed price per unit sold of an item of such, but there are also other modes and metrics of compensation. A royalty interest is the right to collect a stream of future royalty payments.
The Copyright Act of Canada is the federal statute governing copyright law in Canada. It is jointly administered by the Department of Industry Canada and the Department of Canadian Heritage. The Copyright Act was first passed in 1921 and substantially amended in 1988 and 1997. Several attempts were made between 2005 and 2011 to amend the Act, but each of the bills failed to pass due to political opposition. In 2011, with a majority in the House of Commons, the Conservative Party introduced Bill C-11, titled the Copyright Modernization Act. Bill C-11 was passed and received Royal Assent on June 29, 2012.
APRA AMCOS consists of Australasian Performing Right Association (APRA) and Australasian Mechanical Copyright Owners Society (AMCOS), both copyright management organisations or copyright collectives which jointly represent over 100,000 songwriters, composers and music publishers in Australia and New Zealand. The two organisations work together to license public performances and administer performance, communication and reproduction rights on behalf of their members, who are creators of musical works, aiming to ensure fair payments to members and to defend their rights under the Australian Copyright Act (1968).
CCH Canadian Ltd v Law Society of Upper Canada, [2004] 1 SCR 339, 2004 SCC 13 is a landmark Supreme Court of Canada case that established the threshold of originality and the bounds of fair dealing in Canadian copyright law. A group of publishers sued the Law Society of Upper Canada for copyright infringement for providing photocopy services to researchers. The Court unanimously held that the Law Society's practice fell within the bounds of fair dealing.
The International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers is an international non-governmental, not-for-profit organisation that aims to protect the rights and promote the interests of creators worldwide. It advocates for strong legal protection of copyright and authors' rights. It is the world's largest international network of authors' societies, also known as Collective Management Organisations (CMOs), copyright / royalty collection societies, collecting societies, or Performing Rights Organisations (PROs).
The Authors' Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS) is a British organisation that works to ensure that writers are fairly compensated for any of their works that are copied, broadcast or recorded. It has operated in the United Kingdom since 1977. From that year to 2016, the ALCS distributed over £450 million to authors, and at the end of 2016 had in excess of 90,000 members.
The Irish Music Rights Organisation (IMRO) is a national organisation that administers the performing right in copyright music in Ireland on behalf of its members and on behalf of the songwriters, composers and music publishers of the international overseas societies that are affiliated to it. At present IMRO has approximately 11,000 songwriter, composer and music publisher members.
The copyright law of Australia defines the legally enforceable rights of creators of creative and artistic works under Australian law. The scope of copyright in Australia is defined in the Copyright Act 1968, which applies the national law throughout Australia. Designs may be covered by the Copyright Act as well as by the Design Act. Since 2007, performers have moral rights in recordings of their work.
SIAE is the Italian copyright collecting agency. Founded in 1882 in the Kingdom of Italy, it is the monopolist intermediary between the authors of musical tracks and consumers, managing the economic aspects and the distribution of money from royalties of Italian-copyrighted music to authors and on their behalf. In the 2000s and 2010s, SIAE is known for the controversial decision to claim payment through the "Private Copy Siae Tax" for every blank CD, DVD, and HDD sold in Italy since 2001. From 2013 to February 2015, the main spokesperson of the SIAE organization was the songwriter Gino Paoli, who was the president of the society. Paoli resigned after he was investigated for tax evasion; Filippo Sugar was then appointed as a president. The current president is Mogol, famous Italian lyricist.
Collective rights management is the licensing of copyright and related rights by organisations acting on behalf of rights owners. Collective management organisations, such as collecting societies, typically represent groups of copyright and related rights owners, such as authors, composers, publishers, writers, photographers, musicians and performers. At the least, copyright owners authorize collective rights management organizations to monitor the use of their works, negotiate licenses with prospective users, collect remuneration for use of copyrighted works, ensuring a fair distribution of such remuneration amongst copyright owners. Governmental Supervision varies across jurisdictions, from being limited to antitrust regulation in the United States to sectoral regulators in jurisdictions like the EU, India.
The Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA) is a UK non-profit organisation established in 1983 to perform collective licensing on behalf of its members the Authors' Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS), Publishers' Licensing Services(PLS), the Design and Artists Collecting Society (DACS) and PICSEL. The Copyright Licensing Agency is based in 5th Floor, Shackleton House, 4 Battle Bridge Lane, London, SE1 2HX.
The Design and Artists Copyright Society (DACS) is a UK not-for-profit rights management organisation that exists to collect and distribute royalties to visual artists.
Collection administration of copyrights describes the use in Canadian law of collective societies to manage licenses for copyrighted material belonging to more than one copyright owner. These collective societies are responsible for granting permission to use the works they manage and setting out what conditions users of their works must follow. Examples of collective societies in Canada include: Christian Video Licensing International and the Canadian Broadcasters Rights Agency
Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada (SOCAN) v. Bell Canada, 2012 SCC 36, is a leading Canadian case on the application of fair dealing under s. 29 of the Copyright Act. It pertained to the use of previews of musical works on online music services that sell digital files of musical works.
The Jamaica Association of Composers, Authors and Publishers (JACAP) is a Jamaican not-for-profit membership collective management organization which was established in 1998. JACAP administers the public performance and, if assigned also, the mechanical (reproductive) rights and synchronization rights of lyricists (authors), music composers and music publishers in Jamaica. JACAP is a member of the umbrella organisation for copyright societies CISAC - The International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers. JACAP is also a founding member of The Association of Caribbean Copyright Societies (ACCS).
Indian Reprographic Rights Organisation (IRRO) is a copyright society established under Section 33 of the Copyright Act, 1957. Its main objective is to ensure that the copyrights of authors are protected and that copyright owners are respected and rewarded when their original works are used and reproduced. The guidelines of regulating copyrights by IRRO are curated in a fair way that rewards the authors, creators, and publishers and allows easy reproduction of their works and publications. The organization deploys the highest ethical standards when it comes to dealing with the rights of authors, collecting and distributing remunerations, and the bonafide funds they hold.