Licensing Information
What's Licensing all about?
CLASS’s core business is copyright licensing. We act as the conduit between members who are owners of copyright works and users of copyright materials who are our licensees.
As a not-for-profit organisation, we help our members and the members of our partner foreign reproduction rights organisations (RROs) obtain equitable remuneration for the use of their works, even whilst we serve the needs of educators, students and other users, by facilitating these users’ use of copyright works for educational purposes.
The licence schemes operated by CLASS fall in two broad categories:
- A licence scheme for all non-profit educational institutions which fall under the definition of the term “educational institution” in section 83 of the Copyright Act 2021 (“the Act”) (in lieu of the statutory licence provided under section 198 of the Act); and
- A licence scheme for private educational institutions.
The standard terms of a CLASS licence include:
- The requirement for the licensee to pay licence fees, which may be determined based on several criteria, including, for instance, the level of the educational institution, student enrolment, course type, and usage of copyright material, amongst other factors. A limited licence for the licensee to copy and communicate to its staff and students the works in CLASS’s portfolio (subject to the terms and conditions in the CLASS licence); and
- A requirement for the licensee to keep partial records (for a period of 60 days per academic year) of the use of the licensed material (in order that CLASS may rely on the records to distribute the licence fees which it collects to its members and partner RROs).
The fees collected by CLASS are then tallied and checked before they are distributed to our members and partner RROs in our annual royalties distribution exercise, in accordance with the CLASS Distribution Policy.
Who should be licensed?
If you or your institution/organisation make use of copyright works, for example, you photocopy material from books, articles from newspapers and magazines or download works, you are required by law to seek permission from the publishers/authors before using them.
Doing so without permission is an offence under the Copyright Act. But if you obtain a copyright licence from CLASS, the licence will allow you or your institution/organisation to photocopy copyright works legally within the limits as stated in the CLASS Licence.
To find out more about how you can go about obtaining a licence, please contact CLASS at info@class-singapore.com
What materials are covered under a CLASS license?
CLASS licenses works belonging to CLASS members, and the members of foreign reproduction rights organisations (RROs) which have entered into reciprocal licensing agreements with CLASS.
Click here for the full list of CLASS members, and here for the full list of CLASS’s partner foreign RROs.
For further information of the works licensed by CLASS, including: (a) confirmation that a particular work is or is not part of CLASS’s portfolio; or (b) proof that a particular work is part of CLASS’s portfolio, please e-mail us at info@class-singapore.com and we will ordinarily respond to you within 14 days of receiving your query,
CLASS Licensing Fees
CLASS charges our licensees depending on the level of education provided. From pre-school all the way up to tertiary levels of education, the number of materials copied for teaching and learning purposes steadily increases. As such, as the levels of the education provided by our licensees increase, so does the associated costs.
It is with such an approach that CLASS has meticulously calculated a fair fee to charge such that our members can be fairly compensated for their works being used. For more information on CLASS’s license fees, please email us at info@class-singapore.com.
