Business Licence

Most literary and visual works are protected by copyright, your employees will usually need permission from the copyright owner to copy and share text, tables, graphs or images that were created by others.

This includes content from:

• Newspapers and magazines
• Industry reviews, journals and updates
• Books
• Research and competitive analysis reports
• Survey plans and maps

Research conducted by independent market research agency FiftyFive5 found
2 out of 3 white-collar workers regularly access published content in their role, often downloading, copying and sharing it.

Our Business Licence covers most day-to-day activities within in a business that would generally require a copyright licence or permission, including:

• organisation-wide copying and internal sharing rights for digital, online and print content, including newspapers, magazines, journals, books, websites and other published works
• use of Australian newspaper and selected licenced content in GenAI tools and workflows
• sharing Australian newspaper content and AI-generated outputs externally
• use of published content in council reports, briefing papers and committee materials
• use of third-party content in staff training, education and internal knowledge-sharing activities
• storage and retention of published content for governance, compliance and record-keeping purposes
• additional rights beyond media monitoring licences, including content copied directly from websites and other published sources

Copyright Agency’s Business Licence is a “blanket licence” which covers the use of our member’s works* in your day to day business activities.

The licence does not just cover newspaper content, the licence also enables the use of books, journals, website content, research papers and other published content.

Through our reciprocal rights arrangements, the Business Licence also includes rights to use overseas works.

*some exclusions apply, please see the licence terms and conditions for detail

From May 2025, the Business Licence was extended to include the right to use Australian Newspaper Articles in Generative AI tools as prompts, and to copy and share with colleagues GAI outputs from prompts that include news media content and/or that contain news media content.

From June 2026, the rights in the Business Licence have been extended again to also enable selected other content from Australia and overseas to be used in Generative AI tools as prompts.

The Business Licence does not grant rights for:

• compiling datasets, from inputs or outputs, for use in training, fine-tuning, augmenting or validating AI tools,
• text and data mining,
• creating products that are sold

For more information about the Business Licence inclusions:

The Downstream Licence provides a base level of copyright coverage for content received through a media monitoring service that is licensed by Copyright Agency. It allows the customer to share that content internally by email or via an intranet, and store it for up to 12 months.

The Business Licence builds on the base level of copyright coverage in the Downstream Licence by providing additional rights for Australian news content, including emailing content externally and posting to your website and the ability to use more than news media content.

	Downstream Licence Available Via CA Licenced MMOs	Business Licence
Make a digital copy
Print a copy
Email internally
Place on intranet
Store for 12 months
Store for longer than 12 months
Use newspaper articles published by Australian Community Media, News Corp Australia and Nine Publishing
Make a copy directly from publisher’s website
Use news content not received from a Copyright Agency Licenced media monitor, such as from PR Agencies or other third parties
Post to website, social media or extranet
Email to third parties
Use in external documents like annual reports, meeting agendas and submissions**
Input individual Australian news articles into GenAI systems on an ad-hoc basis for prompt engineering
Use the output of Australian news articles from GenAI systems within your business and on your website and social media
Use content from Journals, books, research materials in your business
With “Client Sharing”, send newspaper articles and authorise your clients to share newspaper articles with you**
Obtain up to 6 years retrospective coverage for unlicenced use of works

*applies to Australian newspaper articles only and limits apply. Please refer to the relevant licence agreements for full terms and conditions.
**limitations apply
This fact sheet is a guide only. Please refer to the licence agreement for full terms and conditions.

Learn more about the differences between the Downstream Licence and the Business Licence

The Business Licence covers all employees and directors of a company.

In most cases, we only need your organisation’s industry and current number of full-time equivalent (FTE) staff to provide pricing.

Copyright Agency is a not-for-profit organisation. Licensing revenue is redistributed to our members: creators such as journalists, authors and publishers. This allows them to continue to develop new high-quality content for organisations like yours to use in the future.

When you need a licence for third-party content on an ad-hoc basis, and it doesn’t fall under your existing copyright licensing arrangements, you can ask us for a pay-per-use licence.

Copyright Agency’s RightsPortal licensing platform makes it simple for you to reuse the specific pieces of content you need, when you need them.

It provides Pay-Per-Use rights for the text from more than 700 Australian news and magazines titles.