CAL payments 2008-09

A summary of the audited CAL payment process as outlined in CAL’s Annual Report..

1. CAL monitors the use of copying and communication in education, business and government and collects licence fees for the use of copyright works.
    
2. After collecting and analysing the data, CAL allocates licence fees to individual copyright works. Last year CAL received more than 14 million individual records of copyright usage.
    
3. Just under half (47.5%) of all material copied and communicated in 2008-09 was sourced from books. The remaining materials fell within the categories of artistic works, including those copied from books (20.4%), newspapers (12.5%), periodicals (10.8%). Other materials copied included websites, print music, law reports, legislation and Australian materials copied overseas.
    
4. CAL’s current distribution policy sets out that payment goes to one person, and to the author first. Where there is more than one author, CAL attempts to notify the authors in turn, alphabetically. Rights holders must be CAL members to receive CAL payments. CAL membership is free and non-exclusive, meaning that rightsholders are  free to license their copyright works to any other individuals or organisations.
    
5. It is only where the author rightsholder decides not to join or is not a member of CAL that CAL recruit or forward payments to publisher rightsholders. Many Australian authors choose to receive payment for the use of their copyright materials via their publisher or literary agent.
    
6. All CAL payment recipients– author, publisher or other – warrant, prior to receiving any CAL payment, that they will on-pay to other copyright owners any agreed CAL payment shares. 
    
7. In 2010 CAL will implement CALdirect: by registering their agreed CAL payment shares, members can request CAL to pay individual rights holders their agreed share of any CAL payment, directly. This will remove the need for authors and publishers to make on-payments to other rightsholders. CAL is currently investing in its systems and infrastructure to ensure it can effectively manage this expected increase in direct recipient payments. 
    
8. CAL made more than 7,500 individual direct payments to copyright owners in 2008-09: 43% were direct payments to authors and 57% were direct payments to publishers.
    
9. CAL’s operating costs were less than 14% in 2008-09 - the lowest in three years, indicating greater efficiencies despite increasing and more complex data collection and analysis - and meaning just over 86 cents in every dollar collected last year has now been made available for payment to copyright owners. CAL’s salaries represented just over 8% of total revenue collected.
    
10. Each year CAL’s annual report contains details of its payments to members and operating costs. CAL’s annual report is tabled in Parliament each year. In addition, CAL is a voluntary signatory to the Code of Conduct for Collecting Societies and submits a report on its operations to independent Code Reviewer, the former Federal Court Judge Mr James Burchett QC. The Code Reviewer’s report on CAL's operations is also made publicly available on CAL’s website.