Tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of pieces of paper have been delivered to the Copyright Agency Limited in the past year notifying it of each recorded instance of photocopying of copyright work in government departments.
The “”mind-blowing” amount of paper was due to an out-of-date provision in the Copyright Act, the chief executive of the agency, Michael Fraser, said yesterday,
He said his offices in Sydney were stacked to the ceiling with boxes full of the notifications which the Federal Government was required to provide to copyright owners under the Copyright Act for the approximately 20 million pages it copies each year.
The agency is agent for thousands of authors and journalists. It receives a notification each time a Federal Government department or agency copies a newspaper article, page of a book or a journal or magazine article. “”It’s a lot of trees,” Mr Fraser said.
The Government also pays 1c a page copyright fee for newspaper articles, 4c for magazines, 5c for books and 12c for journals, as set by an agreement between the agency and the Government.
“”It costs them far more to do the notification than the actual fee,” Mr Fraser said. “”It is quite ridiculous at a time of limited resources when people are trying to cut costs. Every morning there is a couple more boxes in the post.”
Last financial year the Federal Government paid the agency $200,000 in copyright fees. Nearly all of it was for newspaper articles at 1c a page. Some was for magazines, books and journals. That makes nearly 20 million pages. Some instances of copying contained more than one page and several notifications are made on one sheet of paper, but it means the agency will get as many as 100,000 pieces of paper each year unless the law is changed.
Mr Fraser said the Copyright Act must be amended to provide sampling, as with educational institutions’ copying which had worked efficiently and satisfactorily.
Sampling would mean the agency used the Australian Bureau of Statistics or another professional sampler to monitor departments over short periods of time and copyright fees would be distributed according to the samples. It was far more accurate and gave a truer picture than asking for records of each copying.
“”We cannot be sure that all instances are recorded under the present system,” Mr Fraser said. “”Until we get sampling, we cannot be sure authors are getting their due. It is not up to authors to subsidise the government.”
The question of whether newspaper companies or individual journalists owned the copyright has been referred to the Copyright Law Review Committee.
Ironically, only a tiny portion of the tens of thousands of notifications are to be used.
Mr Fraser said it would be impossible for his agency to go through each notification in the mountains of paper and pay each copyright owner for each notification, so it would do the sensible thing and sample them, and pass on copyright fees according to the sample. It would be more sensible, of course, to sample at the source without having to go through the notification stage.
Mr Fraser estimated it would cost the agency $24.72 for each dollar received from the Government to go through each notification.
Mr Fraser called on the Government to pass changes to the Copyright Act as a matter of urgency. Everyone agreed it was necessary but there seemed to be a bureaucratic inertia to get the thing on the Cabinet agenda and through the Parliament.
Responsibility for the matter has passed from Attorney-General’s to the Minister for Justice, Duncan Kerr.
Mr Fraser said officers from Mr Kerr’s officer had been to the agency’s office in the past week and had assured him that it would be treated with priority.
On a related matter, Mr Fraser warned state and territory governments that the agency would be taking legal action unless they paid fees on copyright material they were copying.
The agency had warned them a year ago that they were under a legal duty to notify copyright owners of copying pending negotiations about fees, but none had. He hesitated to estimate how much copyright work was being copied by state governments, but thought it likely that combined they did as much the Federal Government.