Secretary General's September Digest, 2024

What a month of September! When I came back from my summer holidays on 20 August, I knew that it had a lot to prepare for September, but I did not imagine that the month would be so busy.

Sign up here if you did not received our quarterly newsletter on 1th October, in which we highlighted some of the SAA’s achievements over the past few months. In my digest, I will instead share more 'behind the scenes' information with you.

Inside the European Parliament

Back from the summer break, the first thing we did was to follow up on our invitations to meet MEPs and their assistants as they started their work in the committees in September in Brussels. In addition to our meetings in July, we met several MEPs, some of whom we had known since the previous term and others for whom the Parliament and authors’ rights were new. We were particularly eager to send out our invitation to our dinner in partnership with the LUX Audience Award on 18 September in Strasbourg, on the day of the announcement of the five films nominated for the 2025 edition. While we were cooking this event with the SAA members and partners for months, we had to wait for the official announcement of the LUX Audience Award event to the Culture committee members on 4 September to send our invitation to the MEPs. This situation was very stressful for the team: we did not know if MEPs would be responsive on such a short notice.

Dinner with the LUX Audience Award

Luckily, we had a good turnout of MEPs (12 joined us – our record is 16) and a high participation of SAA members and authors, including some SAA Patrons who came with their CMO: Romas Zabarauskas from Lithuania and Jochen Greve from Germany. This seated dinner has been an iconic event of the SAA for years. It provides an informal space for fruitful discussions between the SAA members, MEPs, film nominees, and external guests from the audiovisual sector. To welcome all our guests and create this festive atmosphere of celebration of European filmmakers and film diversity, my colleagues Annica, Elise and I carefully curate the table seating to ensure that MEPs, authors, members were seated next to someone they could have the most meaningful exchange with.

Barbara Hayes, chair of the SAA, Caroline Otto, chair of FSE and Bill Anderson, chair of FERA welcomed our guests with short opening speeches. We had the chance to also have MEP Emma Rafowicz, Vice-Chair of the Culture Committee, addressing the audience on transparency, remuneration of artists and how AI models train on creative works, highlighting the importance for the European Parliament to address these issues in order to protect artists and creators.

FERA, FSE and SAA joint statement

The day after the dinner, with FERA and FSE, we sent a joint statement to MEPs highlighting the key areas that must be addressed from the start of this new term: freedom of expression and cultural diversity, AI and the future of European creation, collective bargaining to build sustainable careers, fair remuneration for all exploitations of audiovisual authors’ works, diversity of representation and the role of collective management organisations. We also reiterated in the press release the need for a Creators’ Intergroup to address some of these issues horizontally and cross-party.

EU AI Act follow-up

I am happy to let you know that the SAA has been accepted as a stakeholder to participate in the European AI Office’s drawing-up of the first Code of Practice for General-Purpose AI models. We expressed our interest in participating in the process on 25 August and sent a submission (on copyright aspects) to a consultation on the content of such a code of practice by 18 September. This involvement on AI issues in relation to copyright shows that the topic is a top priority for the SAA. Our submission to the consultation, which follows-up on our last year’s paper, is the result of the combined expertise and experience of the SAA members, with whom I had prior discussions. Such a close cooperation will continue all along the drafting process of the code of practice which will last until May 2025.

Belgian legal cases

We unfortunately also faced bad news this month. First, Netflix is taking Belgium to court over the obligation to invest in local production, a possibility offered by the EU Audiovisual Media Services Directive and exercised by a majority of Member States. Second, the Belgian Constitutional Court referred 13 questions for preliminary ruling to the CJEU on the Belgian implementation of Articles 15, 17 and 18 of the 2019 Copyright Directive in relation to a case opened by Google, Spotify and others challenging the Belgian unwaivable and inalienable right to remuneration for authors and performers. The outcome of these court cases can have important and serious consequences on audiovisual authors’ rights and their working environment, which I must admit I am very concerned about. 

To finish on a positive note, I am very happy to have a full team now, with Luisiana, our new Policy and Legal Officer, and Elisa, our new intern, having joined us to monitor the developments at both European and national levels and help with the assessments.

I wish you a colourful autumn October 🍂

Cécile

My 3 reading tips