Layer 04 · Ask the law itself
You ask in plain words. The engine answers with the actual rules: quoted exactly as the drafters wrote them, each with its section number and its currency date (the date confirming that copy of the law is up to date), then read back in plain language.
One boundary sits at the front door instead of the fine print: everything the engine gives you is information, never legal advice. It shows you what the law says and where it says it. What you do about it stays your call, and for the big decisions a lawyer is still the right room.
Question in, rule out
An answer from the engine is not a paragraph of reassurance. It is four parts, in a fixed order, every time.
The rule quoted as the drafters wrote it, not a paraphrase. You read what the law says, in its own words.
The name of the Act and the section number, so anyone can walk to the same shelf and check the same words.
Laws change. Each answer says when its copy of the law was last confirmed current, so you know how fresh the words are.
What the rule appears to say, in everyday words, kept clearly apart from the quote so the two are never confused for each other.
Where it comes from
This layer grows from a working method that started in 2012 and 2013, when one person read the federal law shelf front to back: the Commonwealth Acts, the laws made by the national parliament, as published, in order. Out of that reading came a way of finding the exact provision (a single numbered rule inside an Act) that answers a plain question. That method now runs as software, and it keeps three habits from the reading. here today
Not a summary of the law, and not someone's blog about the law. The engine searches the Acts as the drafters wrote them, so what comes back is the rule itself, ready to quote.
A musician says "gig". The law reaches the same idea through other words. The engine carries your everyday word across to the legal one, so you do not need to know the drafters' vocabulary before you can ask.
If the engine cannot point at the provision behind an answer, it gives no answer. A blank beats a fluent guess, so refusal is built in, not bolted on.
How it searches, how it ranks and where it stops are written up in public, limits included. The music question set, tuned for makers, venues and small labels, is being assembled now. taking shape
First questions it will take
Three questions makers actually ask, first in the queue as the music question set is built. Each one gets the same treatment: the rule quoted, the source named, a plain reading alongside.
Two copyrights live inside one song, and they are separate. The composition (the words and melody, the part you could write out on paper) needs a human author to attract copyright in Australia. The recording (the captured sound itself) carries its own copyright, with its own rules.
Where the human-author line falls for a song made with AI tools is exactly the kind of thing to see quoted, not summarised. So that is what the engine will hand you: the provisions themselves, section numbers and currency dates attached, with the plain reading next to them.
Your distributor is the service that puts your song on Spotify and Apple Music. For at least one major service, the answer sits in its terms: stop paying, and the catalogue comes down, unless a per-release fee was paid earlier to keep each release up.
Terms like that deserve daylight before the subscription starts, not after it lapses. The engine points at the clause; the Terms Table lays the services out side by side, with sources linked.
A contract is not freestanding. It names laws and borrows their force. Hand the engine a contract and it can list which Acts the document leans on, with the clause that points at each one.
That turns a wall of clauses into a map: here are the rules this paper calls in, and here they are quoted, so you can read what you are actually agreeing to sit under.
Getting your money home
Most music money reaches an Australian artist through an overseas company, and loses a little at every border. None of this is advice about your situation, and a registered tax agent is the person to act on it with. It is what the rules say, so you know what to ask.
United States tax law withholds 30% from royalties paid to foreigners. Australia's tax treaty with the United States brings that to 5% on copyright royalties, under Article 12 as amended by the 2001 protocol. The form that claims it is a W-8BEN, it costs nothing, and it lasts three calendar years.
It does a second thing people miss. Without the form on file, some services withhold from your entire payment. With it, withholding applies only to the share earned in the United States. So the form narrows what is taxed as well as the rate.
Licensing your rights to a company outside Australia is a GST-free supply under section 38-190 of the GST Act, which covers supplies made to a non-resident outside Australia, and supplies of rights for use outside Australia.
The wording matters. GST-free is not the same as input taxed: a GST-free supply keeps your entitlement to claim credits on what you bought to make it. Worth raising with your accountant rather than assuming either way.
The foreign income tax offset, in section 770-10 of the income tax act, credits foreign tax you paid on income that is also assessable in Australia. The first thousand dollars is available without the more involved limit calculation.
One caution worth carrying: the offset credits tax you actually owed. Where 30% was withheld only because no form was lodged, the excess is generally a matter of recovering it from the United States rather than claiming it here.
Amuse in Sweden, RouteNote and Ditto in the United Kingdom all state plainly that they deduct no tax and leave it with you. LANDR, a Canadian company, does withhold and issues the United States paperwork to prove it.
Both arrangements are lawful. They just put the work in different places, and you want to know which one you are in before the money lands.
Money earned in United States dollars becomes Australian dollars somewhere, and somebody prices that. PayPal's published Australian schedule adds 4.0% above the base exchange rate on payouts. Payment platforms used by distributors publish conversion charges of about 2%, or up to 3.5%. One distributor, Symphonic, publishes its own markup at 2.50% under five thousand dollars and 1.90% above it, which makes it the only one in this survey that puts a number on it at all.
The banks do not publish theirs. That is not an oversight and not a gap in the research: the competition regulator's inquiry into currency conversion found the major banks give indicative rates only and are not expected to disclose their margins. The same inquiry found Australians sending money overseas could have saved about $150 million in a single year by using the cheapest provider instead of a major bank, with some transfers costing up to 21% more than the cheapest option.
On a thousand dollars of royalties, the difference between the dearest route and the cheapest one is roughly the price of a decent microphone. It is worth ten minutes with your distributor's payout page before the first withdrawal, and it is one of the concrete things a group of makers could ask about together.
Your moment, your call
Early in many music careers comes the question of joining a collecting society: one of the organisations that gather royalties (the small payments owed when songs play on radio, in venues and online) and pass them to the people who made the work. It is easy to treat joining as automatic. It is a choice, with timing on it and trade-offs on both sides.
The engine's job here is not to push either way. It lays the pieces out: what membership covers, what it asks in return, and what changes depending on when you join, each piece with its source alongside. A maker reads the pieces and picks their moment with open eyes. The choice stays where it belongs: with the maker.