Presentation: Remuneration mechanisms for audiovisual authors in the EU
Although most Member States’ delayed transposition of the Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market, Cécile Despringre, Executive Director of the SAA, has been invited as a guest speaker at several occasions to present the state of play of the implementation of the Copyright directive’s – Article 18 – on fair and proportionate remuneration and its impact on audiovisual authors’ remuneration.
On 22 November, Cécile Despringre participated in the Initiative Copyright live-hybrid conference (start 1h 50min) on Authors’ Rights. She presented the situation in the 8 Member States who have completed the transposition of the directive (covering Article 18): the Netherlands, Hungary, France, Germany, Malta, Croatia, Spain and Italy. Among those countries, Cécile Despringre identified 3 trends: Firstly, countries with existing remuneration mechanisms providing proportional remuneration to audiovisual authors, such as the Netherlands, France, Spain, and Italy. Secondly, countries with no pre-existing protection and doing the minimum requirement on Article 18: Hungary and Malta. Thirdly, countries adopting an innovative approach, like Germany. Details about the situation in these countries can be find in her Power Point presentation.
On 2 December, at the invitation of the Federation of European Screen Directors (FERA), Cécile Despringre participated in a panel debate on ’A new deal on authors’ rights in 21st century Europe’. She addressed the weaknesses of the status of audiovisual authors and the long-standing challenges they have been facing in terms of their rights and remuneration, which have been emphasized by the COVID crisis and the rise of streamers. To overcome these barriers, she advocated for the use of all the opportunities given by the implementation of the European directives (the AVMS Directive and the Copyright Directives) to introduce remuneration mechanisms for audiovisual authors, including streamers in the system, and make more use of collective rights management to secure remuneration will flow from users to authors. Collective management is under-exploited in the audiovisual sector while it would help overcome the fragmentation of the market and ensure that authors receive remuneration for the exploitation of their works across Europe.