Some 40 tertiary students received bursary awards worth $50,000 on 30 November 2018 from the Minister for Education Mr Ong Ye Kung in a ceremony organized by the Copyright Licensing and Administration Society of Singapore Limited (CLASS Ltd).
This is the 8th annual bursary award presentation by CLASS, a non-profit copyright management organization that was set up by academic book publishers and authors to protect their intellectual property rights through licensing and the distribution of royalties.
The recipients must be Singaporean tertiary students and are financially challenged. Each university student received $1,800, while polytechnic students were given $1,200 each.
The students were selected by their schools from the National University of Singapore, Singapore Management University, Singapore Institute of Management, Singapore University of Technology and Design, Singapore Institute of Technology, Singapore University of Social Sciences and the five polytechnics — Nanyang, Ngee Ann, Temasek, Singapore and Republic. The CLASS bursary scheme was started in 2011, and has benefitted more than 230 local tertiary students.
The bursary fund comes from copyright licence fees that have been donated by rights-owners belonging to CLASS’ sister organizations based overseas or from royalties donated by local rights-owners.
As a copyright manager of academic works, CLASS licenses and collects royalties from educational institutes in Singapore, including universities, polytechnics, all MOE schools, colleges and government-aided institutions, and more recently, from private education institutions (PEIs) too.
In addition, it also represents rights-owners from its foreign sister organizations, and has been appointed by the International Federation of Reproduction Rights Organizations (IFRRO) to help establish similar licensing and collecting societies in Asia.
So far, CLASS has already helped set up such copyright management agencies in Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam, and is now working with Malaysian and Thai book publishers to establish similar collecting societies in Kuala Lumpur and Bangkok.
CLASS was recently sought by Norway’s National Copyright Organization, NORCODE, to help the Tanzanian copyright society launch its licensing scheme in schools, colleges and universities in Tanzania, which is now operating successfully
