Individual journalists have historically had little control over the republishing and syndication of their work. Open networks like the Internet, however, with their potential for many-to-many transmission, have offered technological opportunities for creators to band together and offer in collaboration what they could not offer alone. Taking up this baton on behalf of its writer members, the UK Authors' Licensing and Collecting Society has applied its twenty years' experience in tandem with technology from the European Commission-sponsored IMPRIMATUR project for the development of electronic copyright management systems, and launched the ByLine project: a global syndication and licensing service for journalists on the Internet. ALCS and IMPRIMATUR are partners in the first six-month trial, which was launched in January 1998 at http://www.universalbyline.com