Image – Getty: Eakrin Rasadonyindee
Editor’s note: Most of our readers are familiar with the International Federation of Reproduction Rights Organisations (IFRRO), and as part of our Rights Edition today (September 5), we look at a move being made to enhance the revenue of reprographic rights’ fees in Poland.—Porter Anderson
By Jarosław Adamowksi | @JaroslawAdamows
‘The Legal Reproduction of Works’
In response to the demands of the market’s authors and artists, the Polish ministry of culture and national heritage is moving to update the country’s reprographic rights’ fee regulations. The objective is to generate up to 200 million zloty (US$54.9 million) in new revenue from importers of electronic equipment to be distributed among authors’ and artists’ organizations.
Reprographic rights fees are charged on electronic devices such as printers, copy machines, and scanners, as well as on blank various media such as flash drives to compensate authors, publishers, and other copyright holders for the creation of personal copies of their works.
Producers and importers of these devices and blank media pay fees to collective management organizations, often called CMOs, which are then tasked with distributing the secured funds to copyright holders.
In Poland, the culture ministry has announced that the country’s reprographic rights fees are among “the lowest in Europe,” as a consequence of “outdated rules on this field, considering tape recorders, VCRs, fax machines, MP3 players and CD recorders as blank media.”
The reprographic rights fee allows creators “to receive compensation for the legal reproduction of their works for private purposes,” according to the ministry’s rationale.
European Union law requires such compensation, but it does not specify the form in which it should be provided. In Polish law, the mechanism has been in place since 1994 and was last updated in 2008—a year in which notebooks, pocket video cameras, and ebook readers were gaining popularity in Poland,” the statement says.
“In the past 17 years, technology and the digital world have changed radically.”
The ministry’s point is that to update the mechanism, a number of new devices have been added, but the total number has been reduced because many of them are no longer in broad use amid the technological advancements of the past two decades. The most important addition to the regulation’s scope is the inclusion of smartphones, tablets, laptops, and televisions with hard drives.
“For all new devices, we are introducing a fee of 1%, and for all the remaining ones we decreased the fees to a maximum of 2%. We reduced the number of devices and blank media from 65 to 19,” according to the statement.
Under the plan, the revised regulation is to enter into force on January 1.
‘The Interests of Authors and Publishers Can Diverge’
Anna Nasiłowska is a writer, a professor at the Institute of Literary Research in the Polish Academy of Sciences, and the president of the Polish Writers’ Association, tells Publishing Perspectives that the organization supports expanding the list of devices and blank media. She says that implementing it through a revised regulation is easier than amending Poland’s law on copyright and related rights.
Anna Nasiłowska. Image: Mikołaj Rek
However, there is concern, she says, about the designation of a local association, Copyright Polska, as the designated distributor of the collected fees, the collective management agency.
“Copyright Polska is primarily a publishers’ association,” Nasiłowska says, “and the interests of authors and publishers can diverge. Until now, Copyright Polska has handled the distribution of library loan fees which played a minimal role in the financial stability of authors because of a limited budget.”
Nasiłowska points to Copyright Polska’s site, which states that some 100 Polish authors have entrusted the association with their rights management.
“However, we are concerned about the designation of a local association,” she says. “There’s also the KOPiPOL association—why was it omitted?”
Both Copyright Polska and KOPiPOL are members of the International Federation of Reproduction Rights Organizations (IFRRO).
The authors, she says, are proposing that the distribution of rights be entrusted to ZAiKS, a national artists’ and composers’ association, which has more than 100 years of experience. Its attorneys know what kind of support artists need, Nasiłowska says.
More from Publishing Perspectives on copyright issues in world publishing is here, and more on rights trading, its trends and issues, is here. More on the Polish book market is here.