Today I attended a coordinators training session in Melbourne for the Australian Schools Copyright Collection (ASCC) for 2019. Three weeks ago I didn’t realise this was a thing, today however I know different. Did you realise that though as schools we have a statutory education licence that enables us to use substantial amounts of copyright material? That the money for the licence sits in a revenue fund? Approximately 80 million dollars annually is collected. The revenue board then distributes this money to the material licence holders. The issue is, is that they can’t distribute the money to the correct people unless we as schools inform them of what were are actually copying, printing and scanning. Apparently this is done by survey.

125 schools in Victoria are selected every year to undertake this survey and the results are then scaled. The survey could be considered quite onerous on first look though. Schools participating are required to log every photocopying, scanning and printing job they do for school. ‘Jobs’ are either published or unpublished works. I won’t detail here what the breakdown is of each of these, but it can be a tad confusing.

To log these ‘jobs’ a teacher, after determining if it’s a published or unpublished piece of work, needs to fill in a form. Unpublished work just needs to be signed and dated with the amount of copies. While published work needs to have a whole sheet dedicated to it, that the teacher (or admin staff) must read and check off relevant sections, before attaching a copy of photocopying and a copy of ownership, for example ISBN. This is done for a whole term.

Now I was thinking how I can get the staff at my school to add this task to their workload. I guess it’s simple in the end. It’s the only way people will get paid. Without this survey, the owners of materials don’t get an income. It’s only fair that they benefit from our use of their product. This is not to say I’m looking forward to term 2 when this survey will run but I can see the value in it.

If you would like to read more about the Statutory Education Licence you can visit this website www.copyright.com.au/licences-permission/educational-licences/