Last updated 12 February 2026

According to the Resale Royalty Right for Visual Artists Act 2009 (Cth) (RRRVA Act), the resale royalty right, which subsists for 70 years after the death of the artist, is inalienable (s 33) and unable to be waived (s 34). It is, however, able to be transferred upon death of the artist to a successor in title (s 12). The resale royalty right only applies where the holder of the right (either the artist or their successor) is an Australian citizen, a permanent resident of Australia or a national or citizen of a prescribed reciprocating country (s 14).

The scheme grants artists a royalty on the resale of original artworks. More specifically, royalties are received from resales of original works of visual art sold through the secondary art market where the seller has acquired the work after the legislation takes effect and the work is resold for a minimum of $1000 (s 10(1)(a)). The resale royalty scheme applies to original works of visual art, which are defined in the Act to include traditional fine arts such as paintings, sculptures, drawings and engravings, along with applied or decorative arts such as jewellery, glassware, ceramics and tapestries, installations, digital video and multimedia artworks (s 7(2) RRRVA Act). Buildings, plans or models for buildings, circuit layouts and manuscripts are expressly excluded from the definition (s 9).

The scheme only applies to works created or acquired by the seller, on or after the date of commencement of the Act, when they are later resold through the secondary commercial art market. This protects owners of existing artworks who bought them before the scheme was introduced (s 11 RRRVA Act). The royalty is calculated on the sale price when an artwork resold after the first transfer of ownership in the commercial market. The royalty rate payable is 5% of the sale price of the commercial resale of the artwork (s 18 RRRVA Act).

To ensure that the resale royalty scheme operates effectively, it was decided that a collecting society should be established to collect resale royalties and enforce resale royalty rights on behalf of the holder of resale royalty right (ss 22–31 RRRVA Act). While it was widely thought that the visual art collecting society, Viscopy, would have been given this role, the task of administering the resale royalty scheme was granted to the Copyright Agency Limited (CAL), the collecting society established to deal with the reproduction of literary works. In administering the resale royalty scheme, CAL is required to publish information about commercial resales that it is aware of on its website as soon as it is reasonably practicable (s 22).  If the holder of a resale royalty right does not notify CAL within 21 days post publication that it does not want the collecting society to collect royalties or enforce relevant rights (s 23(1)–(3)), CAL is obliged to collect and distribute royalties and to enforce rights. In addition, vendors, directly or through their agents, must provide CAL with sufficient information about all commercial resales for CAL to ensure, together with the buyer and seller, that royalties are paid to CAL to on-pay artists and their beneficiaries. This information can be provided to CAL by galleries, auction houses or dealers.

As is often the case with the imposition of a new tax, the resale scheme has proved to be controversial, particularly among commercial gallery owners. In this sense, the experience in Australia is not dissimilar to the reactions that the droit de suite scheme provoked in the United Kingdom. While it will be some time before we are in a position to assess the relative costs and benefits of the resale scheme, it will be interesting to see whether and, if so, to what extent it delivers any benefits to artists. It will also be interesting to see whether any of the benefits that are meant to accrue to Indigenous artists and their communities eventuate or whether, as some critics have suggested, the scheme is destined to fail because it does not take account of the particular place that Indigenous art and artists occupy within Indigenous communities.