Eligibility
© James Yang
1. We collect funds from foreign Collecting Societies.
ASCRL collects funds from foreign collecting societies. The societies are sometimes called collective management organizations (CMOs), or Reprographic Rights Organizations (RROs). The societies get funds because the laws of their respective countries require that they be paid for certain uses of visual work in their countries. Payments may be required where the use of visual work is legally permitted by the foreign country without an individual author's consent, or where it is legally permitted without an individual author's license, or where work is used under collective agreements in certain sectors. They sometimes come from legal uses of materials by educational institutions, state agencies, or foreign public television. Funds may also come from libraries lending books or from taxes, levies, or fees on copy machines, printers, or other equipment that is used for copying. The funds may be collected even though there may be no specific record of how any particular work was used, or if any particular author's works were used at all.
The foreign CMOs and RROs arrange for visual work copyright owners, including those in the United States, to receive a share. ASCRL, a 501(c)(6) not-for-profit Collective Management Organization, works together with the CMOs and RROs to assure that the United States rights owners are properly compensated from these funds. This includes authors and rights owners who are US citizens or who have works published in the United States.
2. You join ASCRL and fill in your details on your personal dashboard at the ASCRL Web Portal.
Join ASCRL Registration is free!
Authors and rights owners can go to the ASCRL web portal to sign up and become eligible to receive the funds in accordance with ASCRL's rules and regulations. Agents can also sign-up members.
After filling in personal details, all you need to do to become eligible for funds is to list three (3) titles for your published visual work, including the ISBN numbers for books, ISSN or barcode numbers for magazines, or URLs for websites where the three works appear. You can also give ASCRL general information about the number of individual visual works you have published and how frequently these works were published. This information helps ASCRL determine how much money you should receive.
3. Your payments are automatically processed!
ASCRL will automatically identify the distributions in which you are eligible to participate. This is based on your status as an author, or rights owner, and if you are a photographer or other visual artist, and citizenship. This is also based upon any rules ASCRL receives from the foreign collecting societies that provide the funds and is in turn based upon any rules that are established by the ASCRL Board of Directors and Advisory Board. ASCRL periodically processes the distributions directly to your bank account, or through a PayPal transfer, depending on the information that you provide on the portal. The money goes directly into your bank or PayPal account, or to the member's agent's account if an agent has been designated.