Copyright protection in education is no longer simply about preventing unauthorized copying. In several countries, it has evolved into a structured economic system that allows schools and universities to legally reproduce and share books, articles and digital materials, while ensuring that authors, publishers and other rightsholders are remunerated for the use of their works.
The experiences of Norway, Australia and the United Kingdom demonstrate how collective licensing can create a practical balance between access to knowledge and copyright protection. Their models show that when educational institutions are comprehensively licensed, millions generated using protected works can be returned to the creative community.
Norway: An Education Sector Covered by Collective Licensing
Norway provides one of the clearest examples of comprehensive educational licensing. According to kopinor, the entire Norwegian education sector is covered by collective licensing agreements, including primary and secondary schools, private schools, higher education institutions and other educational bodies.
These licenses allow teachers, students and employees to photocopy and scan material from books, newspapers, journals and magazines, store digital learning materials, share content through learning management systems and display materials on digital screens, within the terms of the relevant agreements. The system therefore provides institutions with straightforward legal access to copyrighted content without requiring permission from every individual rightsholder.
The financial dimension is equally significant. Under the higher education agreement covering 2025–2029, Kopinor and Universities Norway agreed on total annual remuneration of approximately NOK 136.15 million, based on 2024 prices, for participating institutions that had signed the agreement by June 2024.
In 2024, Kopinor distributed approximately NOK 297.6 million to Norwegian rightsholders through its member organizations. These funds originated from licensing arrangements covering schools, higher education, public administration, businesses and other uses. Kopinor noted that its largest single distribution during the year largely consisted of remuneration generated by the school sector.
This demonstrates how a comprehensive licensing framework can transform the everyday use of protected works into tangible economic returns for authors, publishers and other creators.
Australia: Education Generates Millions in Copyright Revenue
Australia offers another highly developed model. Copyright agency administers educational licensing arrangements that enable institutions to copy and share protected text and images while compensating rightsholders.
According to its 2024–2025 reporting, its licenses supported more than 9,600 schools serving over four million students, as well as universities serving approximately 1.4 million students.
Education generated approximately AUD 91 million in recognized revenue during the financial year, including AUD 53.1 million from schools and AUD 28 million from universities, with additional revenue coming from technical and other education providers.
Across the different licensing schemes it administers, Copyright Agency allocated more than AUD 113 million to over 27,000 recipients during the year. The figures illustrate how copyright licensing can turn widespread educational use of published material into substantial financial support for creators and publishers.
Australia’s experience is particularly important because it demonstrates a direct connection between the scale of educational licensing and the economic value returned to the creative sector.
United Kingdom: Centralized Licensing for Education
The United Kingdom has also developed a mature collective licensing framework through the Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA). CLA provides licensing solutions for schools, further education colleges, universities and other organizations, allowing copyrighted publications to be legally copied and reused within defined limits.
The system reduces the administrative burden on educational institutions by replacing thousands of potential individual permissions with collective licensing arrangements. At the same time, license revenue is channeled back to authors, publishers and visual creators through CLA’s member organizations.
CLA’s 2024–2025 transparency reporting shows the wider economic scale of its licensing activities. Net license-fee distributions included approximately £30.89 million to ALCS, representing authors, £47.77 million to PLS, representing publishers, and £5.41 million to DACS, alongside payments to other organizations and more than £7.26 million to overseas collective management organizations. These figures relate to CLA’s wider licensing portfolio rather than education alone.
The British experience therefore highlights another important feature of collective management: revenue generated in one country can also reach foreign rightsholders through reciprocal agreements between rights organizations.
From Copyright Protection to Financing Creativity
These international experiences demonstrate that successful educational licensing depends on three interconnected factors: broad institutional coverage, clear rules for lawful use, and efficient systems for collecting and distributing remuneration.
Instead of requiring a teacher or university to contact individual authors and publishers every time part of a book, article or publication needs to be reproduced, collective licensing provides a practical legal framework covering large repertoires of works.
The figures illustrate the potential economic impact. Norway’s Kopinor distributed NOK 297.6 million to domestic rightsholders in 2024, while Australia’s education sector alone generated around AUD 91 million in recognized revenue. In the United Kingdom, CLA channels tens of millions of pounds annually to organizations representing authors, publishers and visual creators.
More importantly, these systems demonstrate that access to knowledge and copyright protection do not have to be competing objectives.
When licensing is comprehensive and efficiently managed, schools and universities gain lawful and convenient access to the materials they need, while authors and publishers receive compensation for repeated use of their intellectual and creative work.
Educational licensing can therefore create a sustainable cycle: knowledge is legally accessed and shared, license fees are collected, remuneration reaches rightsholders, and those revenues help support the creation and publication of new knowledge.
The experiences of Norway, Australia and the United Kingdom offer a clear lesson for developing copyright markets: the broader and more effective the licensing system becomes, the greater its capacity to transform copyright protection from a legal principle into a practical economic mechanism that supports authors, publishers and the wider creative economy.
