MUMBAI: It took four years  and a little more to come through, but it finally has. The Screenwriters Rights Association of India (SRAI) has got the go-ahead from the registrar of copyrights Unnat P Pandit on 30 December to operate as a copyright society under the Copyright Act, 1957.  What that means is that it can collect royalties for dramatic works  and literary works associated with dramatic works.  

This means good news for story writers, scriptwriters, dialogue writers of television shows , OTT shows and films. They  can now look forward to a future where they can get royalties for their works.

In fact, the Screen Writers Association (SWA)  and its members were made aware  of this through minister of commerce Piyush Goyal’s office which posted the SRAI certificate on social media late in the evening of 30 December.

The request for the registration was made to the  registrar of copyrights (which falls under the department for promotion of industry and internal trade  which in turn is a body under the commerce ministry) on 4 November 2020 by SRAI’s chairman Anjum Rajabali with Vinod Ranganathan as the CEO and veteran writers like Saket Chaudhary, Kamlesh Pandey, Rajesh Dubey, Vipul Shah, Mohammed Badiuzzaman (Zaman Habib), Javed Akhtar and Juhi Asheesh Malhotra as members of the governing body, according to documents available with indiantelevision.com..

The SRAI is a section 7 company and was set up in February 2016.

For the writing community, however, this is probably the first step of many to follow.

“What will follow are negotiations between the SRAI and the platforms  - whether OTT or broadcasters or producers - on the rate of the royalties,” says an industry source. “How long this will take will depend on how reasonable both sides will be. However, when an agreement is reached, it will be succor for the writing community which has been deprived of royalties unlike their counterparts in other parts of the world.”