For Rightsholders

Become a Member

Your Creativity. Your Rights. Your Royalties.

If your work has been published in Uganda, you can join URRO. That includes authors, poets, playwrights, translators, journalists, academics, illustrators, photographers and publishers. Once you are a member, we manage your reproduction rights, license users on your behalf, and pay you royalties you would have no practical way of collecting yourself.

Who can join

• Authors: individual creators of published works, including illustrators and photographers
• Publishers: companies, universities, institutions and other bodies that publish
• Author-publishers: self-publishers who hold both roles (one membership, one vote)
• Successors: estates, heirs and others who have inherited or acquired rights
• Associations: bodies representing authors or publishers under written mandates

How to join

Check that you are eligible
Gather your documents: identification, and evidence of your published works
Complete the author or publisher application form
Sign your mandate agreement
Make a declaration of your works
We verify your details, normally within thirty working days
Your membership is confirmed and your works are added to the repertoire

What it costs

The annual membership fee is UGX 50,000.

We ask only for what we need: your name, contact and payment details, your works (with ISBN, ISSN or DOI where you have them) and your signed mandate. Your information is handled in line with the Data Protection and Privacy Act.

Authors

Your work is protected by copyright from the moment you create it. But chasing every school, printer or office that copies it is not something one person can do. When you join URRO you make a declaration of your works to us. We then license users on your behalf and pay you your share of what we collect, so you can get on with writing.

Declaring your works to URRO is not the same as registering copyright. Copyright registration is done by URSB. A declaration simply tells us which works are yours so that we can license them and pay you.

If your publisher is also a member, each of you is paid your own share.

Publishers

URRO represents publishing houses alongside individual authors. You make a declaration of the titles in your catalogue, and we license the institutions that copy from them and pay you your share of the fees collected. That income supports the long-term health of Uganda’s publishing industry and its fight against piracy.

We ask publisher members to tell us the date of the publishing contract and of first publication for each title, and to let us know when rights in a title expire or return to the author.

Mandate Your Rights

A mandate is your written authorisation for URRO to manage your reproduction rights: to license users, collect payment and, where necessary, act against infringement. It is non-exclusive, and it does not transfer your copyright or your moral rights. You can leave a named work or a particular use out of it, and you can withdraw on six months’ written notice.

Registration of your mandate

The law now requires contracts of this kind to be registered with the Registrar of Copyright. URRO submits every signed mandate agreement to URSB for registration within sixty days of signing. The member pays the registration charges: the URSB fee of UGX 50,000 and a URRO administrative charge of UGX 10,000, UGX 60,000 in all.

What the law says: Contracts of assignment, licence or transfer, and publishing contracts, must be in writing and registered with the Registrar within sixty days of signing. A contract that is not registered in time is voidable. Section 13A provides that, subject to the contract, an assignment, licence or transfer of economic rights is valid for not more than twenty years, after which the rights revert to the author. When rights in a title return from a publisher to its author, the publisher’s share of URRO royalties for that title ends.

Members’ benefits

• One mandate covers your reproduction rights across every licensed user
• We license users and collect on your behalf
• Royalties paid to you at least once a year, with a clear statement
• A vote at the annual general meeting, and the right to stand for the Board
• The annual report and audited accounts before each annual general meeting
• A say before URRO sets or changes its licence fees
• Representation and advocacy, including in copyright law reform
• Copyright information and advice
• Access to the Rightsholders Portal to follow your works and payments

Author Categories

An author may hold more than one category. The category is recorded for each work, so that a novelist who also writes textbooks is A01 for the novels and A05 for the textbooks.

Code	Author category	Typical works and qualifying interest
A01	Fiction and general literary author	Novels, short stories, biographies, memoirs, histories, essays and general-interest books.
A02	Poet	Poetry collections and individual poems published in anthologies, textbooks and periodicals. Each poem is a separate work, even where it appears inside another publication.
A03	Playwright and scriptwriter	Published plays, stage directions and broadcasting scripts. URRO manages the copying of the published text only. Stage performance and broadcasting are outside its mandate.
A04	Children’s and young adult author	Texts of picture books, graded readers, storybooks and novels for young readers.
A05	Educational and textbook author	School textbooks, teacher’s guides, workbooks, study guides, examination support texts and other curriculum materials.
A06	Academic and research author	Scholarly books, chapters, journal articles, conference papers, monographs and research reports where copyright subsists and the author has retained or shares the relevant rights.
A07	Scientific, technical and professional author	Scientific articles, technical manuals, and legal, medical, engineering and other professional publications and commentary.
A08	Reference work author	Encyclopedias, dictionaries, directories, glossaries and atlases, including dictionaries and grammars of Ugandan languages.
A09	Journalist and periodical contributor	Articles, features, columns and commentary in newspapers, magazines and periodicals. For employed journalists, ownership follows the Act and the employment contract.
A10	Translator and adaptor	Translations, adaptations and other transformations of existing works or of expressions of folklore, where any required authority was obtained. Protection covers the translator’s or adaptor’s own contribution.
A11	Editor, compiler and anthologist	Original selection, arrangement, annotation or editorial matter that attracts copyright. Routine copy-editing or proofreading does not qualify.
A12	Illustrator, photographer and visual contributor	Illustrations, photographs, cartoons, comics, maps, diagrams, cover art and graphic design reproduced in eligible publications.
A13	Composer and lyricist of printed music	Music and lyrics published in graphic form, such as sheet music, songbooks and hymnals. URRO manages reprographic copying only, in coordination with the collecting society for musical works.
A14	Digital-first author	Authors of e-books, online articles, blogs and e-learning content that are fixed and published only in digital form.
A15	Other eligible contributor	A protected contribution within URRO’s registered category of works that does not fit another code. The Secretariat records the nature of the contribution.