Carole Tongue has forwarded a briefing on a recent webinar organised by the International Authors organisation with contributions from Cecile Despringre and Patrick Raude. It was reported that The French law enshrining the unwaivable right to remuneration for audiovisual authors has been updated to cover streamers as follows below.
Streamers, be it Netflix or Disney, will have to invest 20% of turnover in the French audiovisual marketplace.
This represents a lot of money that will reach authors. Patrick linked this to Société des Auteurs et Compositeurs Dramatiques -SADC (a French collecting society that does collective rights management on behalf of authors) sending money to Casa del Papel authors in Spain. He also said this needs promoting in other countries.
In UK and elsewhere producer/employer buy-out of rights from audiovisual and other authors is the norm. Not so in France where it is forbidden. Even if an author wanted to do it they can’t. So an audiovisual author will continue to be remunerated from the success of a film. If a disributor like Netflix tries to buy out rights it will prove risky for them – they won’t get film subsidies from the CNC, and the film won’t count towards an AVMS quota.
Youtube and Netflix have been covered by the legislation for 5 years, but now Amazon has been drawn under it as well. Other platforms like Tik Tok and Facebook will now also shortly be covered by the legislation and have to negotiate with the SACD. The SACD’s hand is strong because it represents 50K authors in France.
VODs are now to be mandated to report viewing figures. They normally don’t want to share the number of subscribers and when something was seen.
Now SACD will be able to require them to report on a regular basis – even quarterly.
More to follow on this.