CAL Cultural Fund Proposed Increase for Australian Cultural Activities

The Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) is a not-for-profit, membership-based Australian copyright management company whose role is to bridge between creators and users of copyright material. CAL represents authors, journalists, visual artists, photographers and newspaper, magazine and book publishers as their non-exclusive agent to license the copying of their works to the general community. CAL has distributed over $650 million since 1989 and has over 16,000 members.

Part of CAL's charter is to run the Cultural Fund, which up to 2010 allocated 1% of its earnings to support a wide range of projects that aim to encourage and provide practical assistance to CAL's members and the Australian cultural community. There is now a proposal on the table to increase this funding to 1.5% per annum.

We strongly recommend that Australian comics creators (writers and artists) become members of CAL to protect their respective IP interests, but also to register their votes at the upcoming CAL AGM in November in favour of increasing the Cultural Fund Allocation to 1.5% per annum. This can be done in person or by proxy. Both of us are members and will be attending in support of the initiative so if any Australian comics creators are current members or are intending to become members during the next three to four weeks and can't make the AGM then one option before you is to nominate either of us – Julie Ditrich or Jozef Szekeres – as your proxies.

CLICK HERE if you want to access the CAL online membership application, and hope to see you at the AGM!