December 12, 2018.
To Members of the European Parliament
Considering the ongoing negotiations on the Copyright Directive, The EWC and ECSA reiterated our strong support for the right of revocation/rights reversion mechanism (Article 16a),
which had been adopted by an overwhelming cross-party majority in the EP Legal Affairs committee on 20 June 2018 and confirmed in Plenary on 12 September 2018.
Now that the Council intended to drastically restrict the scope of Article 16a in full disrespect for the EP’s position, we called on MEPs to defend this right, which can benefit hundreds of thousands of authors and greatly improve the availability of millions of cultural works and the dissemination of our cultural heritage. All authors (journalists, writers, film directors, screenwriters, composers and songwriters) in all cultural sectors support such a right.
As adopted by the EP, this right could be triggered in two cases a) “where there is an absence of exploitation” or b) “where there is a continuous lack of regular reporting in accordance with Article 14” (Transparency obligation).
The Council now intended to delete the link with the “continuous lack of regular reporting in accordance with Article 14”; also, to exclude from the scope of this right “works or subject matter from the application of the mechanism if such works or subject matter usually contain contributions of a plurality of authors or performers”.
We expressed regret that the Council had shown no support in case of “a) continuous lack of regular reporting”, and stated our strong concerns against b) the exclusion of works “which usually contain contributions of a plurality of authors or performers”, since a very large majority of contracts for the exploitation of the works “usually contain contributions of a plurality of authors”. Excluding those works would result in an empty and ineffective promise. Consequently, we strongly opposed the exclusion of “works or subject matter from the application of the mechanism if such works or subject matter usually contain contributions of a plurality of authors or performers”.
