Rights Payment System
Since 1996 the Registry has been distributing copyright fees and royalties through its Rights Payment System. This system collects money from publishers and other organizations, and distributes the funds to authors whose works are being used. To date, the Registry has distributed over $1,500,000.
Magazines including Harper's, Cooking Light, Travel & Leisure and Food & Wine have agreed to pay contributors through the Registry for electronic use of their works. The Registry also distributes photocopy royalty payments from the Authors' Licensing and Collecting Society in England.
The Registry retains a 5 percent commission to offset some of its costs in distributing these payments.
The Registry is not intended as a payment service for ordinary royalties and fees. A central payment service makes economic sense for certain types of rights (electronic database rights, photocopy rights, perhaps multimedia rights) where a publisher makes relatively small payments to large numbers of authors. Our aim is to encourage publishers to pay properly for these rights by providing an efficient method of payment.
Prominent Writers Discuss
Rights Payment System
"We've all known for some time that the electronic world was creating new challenges and dangers for those who care about intellectual property rights. The Registry is our way of turning the power of new technologies to good use. I think it's going to show that it is possible, with some good will on all sides, to create new ways of not just guarding intellectual property rights, but putting them to work."
–James Gleick
"The model holds well with multimedia publishers. By permitting these publishers to pay on an advance-and-royalty basis without the burden of detailed bookkeeping, it allows them to lower their risk, which is the whole point of royalty-based payments from the publishers' perspective. The industry should welcome it."
–George J.W. Goodman ("Adam Smith")
"This is a move that will lift the burden from writers forced to waste precious writing time pursuing royalties from copyright use and abuse. Publishers and extra-rights users should appreciate a new tool for efficiency."
–Gael Greene
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