Copyright
CPT is a registered trademark of the American Medical Association. The AMA holds the copyright for the CPT coding system.
Despite the copyrighted nature of the CPT code sets, the use of the code is mandated by almost all health insurance payment and information systems, including the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and HIPAA, and the data for the code sets appears in the Federal Register. As a result, it is necessary for most users of the CPT code (principally providers of services) to pay license fees for access to the code.
Read more about this topic: Current Procedural Terminology