Sounds like Canada, eh?

One of the key problems we have with any sort of collection agency/performance rights organization/collective licensing scheme is that they introduce an unnecessary bureaucracy into the equation and, as a result, money gets redirected from the actual creators to the bureaucracy itself. It’s a giant economic inefficiency that harms content creators. Case in point: Michael Geist points us to the news that the Australian copyright collection group, The Copyright Agency Limited, spent more on its own staff than it gave out directly to content creators. In 2009, it paid its staff $9.4 million, and it disbursed… $9.1 million directly to content creators.

Now, to be fair, the article buries the fact that CAL also gave $76 million to publishers “on the assumption that a proportion of this money will be returned to authors,” but it also notes that it has no checks to see if that money is ever distributed. In other words, CAL doesn’t actually do anything concerning that $76 million other than pass it on to other bureaucracies (not content creators) — who might just be keeping it, rather than disbursing it. As the report notes, CAL collected $114 million last year, and can only say, for certain, that $9.1 million got distributed to actual content creators. Now that’s efficient! Certainly, some of that $76 million may have reached content creators, but no one knows for sure.

So, again, we’re left wondering why such a setup makes sense at all? All that’s happening is that money that could go directly from fans/consumers to content creators gets filtered through inefficient bureaucracies that take huge cuts. That harms content creators.

Record store gets fined for bootleg CD but industry won’t pay artists