EP in favour of collecting societies and levies
Thought that might be relevant to the ACS discussion. Felix
Source: EDRI-gram,bi-weekly newsletter about digital civil rights in Europe
Number 2.2, 28 January 2004
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6. EP IN FAVOUR OF COLLECTING SOCIETIES AND LEVIES
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On 15 January 2004 the European Parliament accepted an own-initiative
report about the importance and future of collecting societies, the
organisations that collect the rights on copyright and neighbouring rights.
The report states that Digital Rights Management is insufficiently
developed to replace the work of collecting societies. According to the
report, reasonable levies (for example on blank CD-recordables) are "the
only means of ensuring equitable remuneration for creators and easy access
by users to intellectual property works and cannot be replaced by Digital
Rights Management Systems."
In 2002 the European Commission promised to produce a Communication about
the collecting societies, to fill in some details left open by the new
Copyright Directive (2001/29/EC). The communication never materialised, and
the Austrian Member of Parliament Mercedes Echerer took the initiative
herself.
In most current member states of the EU collecting societies operate from a
de facto monopoly. Only in the Netherlands (Buma/Stemra) and Italy
(SIAE/IMAE) do the societies still have a legal monopoly. There has been
much criticism about the way these societies collect the royalties for
composers and authors. For example in France the owners of discotheques
were obliged to pay an astonishing 8,25% of their gross turnover to SACEM.
After a long legal battle, the European Court of Justice decided that the
fees indeed seemed very high, certainly in comparison with other countries,
but over all the management costs were too in-transparent to compare with
each other. More importantly, the Court ruled that owners could not be
obliged to pay a blanket fee for the entire repertoire SACEM represents,
but should be offered a choice. Most discotheque owners claimed they didn't
care much about French music and only wanted to play Anglo-American
repertoire.
The European Parliament takes the lessons from these and similar cases into
account, when insisting on using competition law to examine possible abuse
of monopoly, forcing the societies to be transparent about their management
fees, keeping the administrative costs at a maximum of 10-15% and creating
arbitration procedures that are affordable for everybody.
Creators of copyrighted works must be pleased with the double underlining
of their rights of free choice; they are explicitly given the freedom "to
decide for themselves which rights they wish to confer on collective
management societies and which rights they wish to manage individually", a
freedom that must be guaranteed by law. Many artists in Europe are still
forced to sign away all of their rights, including their electronic rights
and all their future productions, to the national collecting society. This
policy for example prevents many artists from offering their own music for
free on their website.
The report carefully avoids to address the most painful issue of Digital
Rights Management; the privacy of the individual user whose eyeballs and
ear shells are being tracked and billed for every single byte of creative
work he or she enjoys. In fact, whenever the report speaks about users, it
seems to refer only to market parties that make money with the exploitation
of copyrighted works.
European Parliament report on collecting societies A5-0478/2003 (15.01.2004)
http://www2.europarl.eu.int/omk/sipade2?PUBREF=-//EP//NONSGML+REPORT+A5-2003-
0478+0+DOC+PDF+V0//EN&L=EN&LEVEL=2&NAV=S&LSTDOC=Y
European Court of Justice, joined cases 110/88, 241/88 and 242/88 against
SACEM (13.07.1989)
http://europa.eu.int/smartapi/cgi/sga_doc?smartapi!celexplus!prod!CELEXnumdoc
&lg=en&numdoc=61988J0110
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11. ABOUT
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EDRI-gram is a bi-weekly newsletter about digital rights in Europe.
Currently EDRI has 14 members from 11 European countries. EDRI takes an
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share knowledge and awareness through the EDRI-grams. All contributions,
suggestions for content or agenda-tips are most welcome.
Newsletter editor: Sjoera Nas
Information about EDRI and its members:
http://www.edri.org/
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