Creators
Learn about creator affiliation, the Payback payment, and other royalties and services for writers and visual artists.

Title Specific Distributions

Title specific royalty distributions occur when Access Copyright receives data from our licensees on the works they have copied under their licence with us. We use this information and distribute royalties collected from our licensees to the writers, visual artists and publishers of the works that have been copied.

Access Copyright makes two types of title specific distributions.

  • Full reporting - Direct distributions based on copying information sent to us by our licensees.*
  • Partial reporting - Distributions based on copying surveys 

Full Reporting

In certain cases, licensees must submit bibliographic information to Access Copyright outlining the works they copy, including the number of pages they copy and the number of times each page is copied. Access Copyright uses this information to distribute the royalties received for this copying directly to the original creators and publishers of that material. For creators not affiliated with Access Copyright, any portion of royalties they are entitled to are sent to their publisher with instructions to pass them along to them.

We distribute royalties from many of the sectors we licence using full reporting, including:

  • Colleges & universities (for coursepack copying)
  • Businesses (for distributing hard copies to non-Full Time Equivalents (FTEs) and for educational course package copying)
  • Non-profit Associations and Organizations (for distribution of hard copies to non-Full Time Equivalents (FTEs) and for educational course package copying)
  • Document delivery
  • Transactional licences (licences for the reproduction of pre-identified works for one time use)
  • Other Reproduction Rights Organizations (RRO's)

Partial Reporting

Royalties for copying done in primary and secondary schools are distributed based on copying surveys that are conducted in schools across Canada (excluding Quebec). These surveys are designed to provide a statistically relevant sample of which works are copied in primary and secondary schools.

Want more information on our royalty distributions? Check out our royalty distribution schedule for 2024. Click for more information on our royalty distributions as well as how we split royalties between creators and publishers.

*A person, company, etc., to whom an Access Copyright licence is granted or issued.