Polish Government Drafts New Authors’ Rights Collective Management Law

WARSAW – Poland’s Ministry of Culture and National Heritage is drafting a new law on collective rights management which is to implement the relevant European Union legislation into Polish law. However, a think tank with close ties to the government has released a report that points to the relatively high operational costs of the authors’ and creators’ organisations, and could pave the way for further modifications to the system.

The draft bill [available here, in Polish] is accompanied by a document that contains the reasoning behind its introduction [available here, in Polish]. It states that the main “aim of the drafted bill is to fully implement the European Parliament’s and Council’s Directive 2014/26/UE from 26 February, 2014 on Collective Rights Management into the Polish legal system.”

According to the European Commission’s statement [available here, in English], the directive “aims at ensuring that rightholders have a say in the management of their rights and envisages a better functioning of collective management organisations as a result of EU-wide standards. The new rules will also ease the multi-territorial licensing by collective management organisations of authors’ rights in musical works for online use.”

Meanwhile, the activities of Poland’s collective rights management organisations were analysed in a recent report [available here, in Polish] by the Warsaw-based think tank Fundacja Republikańska (Republican Foundation). The institution was set up in 2009, and it has gained prominence since the October 2015 election that paved the way for the creation of a government by the conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party. Since then, many of the think tank’s experts and collaborators have been appointed to various government positions. These, among others, include Minister of Digital Affairs Anna Streżyńska, Deputy Minister of Finance Paweł Gruza, and Michał Góras, who heads the Office of the Minister of Culture and National Heritage. This provides the foundation’s recommendations with considerable impact on policymaking.

The think tank report compares the activities of Poland’s twelve collective rights management organisations which manage the rights of authors, musicians, artists, film industry professionals, scientists, playwrights, actors, and other creative professionals. It also compares their operational costs with that of the organisations’ counterparts in other member states of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). It indicates that in Poland, these costs are significantly higher than in numerous western countries, such as the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Spain, Finland, Denmark and others.

In a comment [available here, in Polish] that accompanies the report, the think tank says that “in our opinion, the method of dividing the revenue generated by royalties, their use and the amount of the collected contribution is non-transparent and unjust” in Poland. “This decreases citizens’ trust towards the state and [the organisations], and unnecessarily antagonizes creators’ and art recipients’ groups.”

To illustrate this claim, the report states that the Polish Society of Authors and Composers (ZAIKS) “declares to operate in a non-profit manner” but “in practice, this organisation has a very significant reserve of non-distributed financial resources: as of end-2015, it exceeded PLN 1 billion [US$252 million]. Such a state has been in place since at least 2010.”

“We believe that the system of collective rights management needs to be reformed. Poles expect it to be more transparent and less repressive,” the foundation says in its comment.

This said, the think tank was criticised by the ZAIKS which released a statement [available here, in Polish] in which it says “the report presents the systems of collective rights’ management of selected countries, also in Poland, in a manner that is incomplete, unprecise, and partly – also erroneous.”

According to the ZAIKS, “the conclusion included in the comment on the report which states that the collective rights management system in Poland should be ‘more transparent’ and ‘less repressive’ is worthless in its generality, in particular because [the organisations] have complied, over the past few years, with a very broad requirement to report data in their reports, also financial ones, that are subject to the legal requirement to be evaluated by a statutory auditor.” The organisation also states that using the term “repressive” regarding the system is “incomprehensible and constitutes an exceptional abuse.”

 

Image Credits: Danuta Matloch for the ministry