Joint statement on Copyright Levies in the Digital Single Market

AFDEL (France), AGEFE (Portugal), ANITEC (Italy), APDETIC (Romania), Bitkom (Germany), FFTI (Finland), ITAS (Slovakia) IT&Telekomföretagen (Sweden), Nederland ICT (Netherlands), PIIT (Poland), SEPE (Greece), SFIB (France), techUK (UK) and ZIPSEE Digital Poland (Poland) all support the fundamental right of creators to fair compensation. Intellectual property is a vitally important resource. Cultural creativity & technological innovations are catalysts driving the development of new business models and income streams for creators and right holders.

Yet, the current private copying levy schemes in France, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania and Sweden are broken beyond the point of repair1 . Legislative decision makers are called upon to fundamentally reform such levy models.

Technological and social changes within our information society demand that Copyright Law needs to be adjusted to reflect a fair balance of involved interests. Copyright Law has to also provide a legal framework in which new business models can flourish. Technology driven innovation cycles are constantly becoming shorter in a digitized and highly convergent world. Hence copyright legislation is faced with ever shorter intervals with the task of finding real-time, equitable responses to new usage scenarios and business models.

Copyrighted works represent a valuable good. Efforts must go on to raise awareness of the value of copyright in our society. Especially our children and young people who are surrounded with file sharing services and peer-to-peer networks have to be provided with legitimate offers which lead away from an ’everything is free’ mentality. Therefore, legislative conditions must be created to meet the needs of today’s consumer who must be enabled to get tailored services fitted to their demands.