The fight for fair remuneration for authors is a core issue when leaders from collecting societies around the world meet for the CISAC general assembly in Lisbon this week.
/ 09/06/2017 / codexCISAC works for 4 million authors from around the world through their 239 management companies in 123 countries. TONO has been a member of CISAC since 1929, and is represented at the general meeting by CEO Cato Strøm and Deputy Chairman of the Board, Jørgen Karlstrøm. In total, more than 200 leading authors and managers from management companies from all parts of the world are participating.
The General Assembly meets under a united call for governments around the world to establish legislation that provides fair and equitable remuneration for music creators, screenwriters, directors and visual artists. CISAC’s top priority is to influence politicians to create a fairer economy for creators on the internet. It is a clear trend worldwide that large technology companies and platform providers make a lot of money by facilitating access to copyrighted content, such as music, without the services paying a fair share of the revenue to those who have created and own the content.
“Globalization has led to an ever-increasing concentration of technology giants with enormous power who want access to creative content without paying decently and fairly for it. CISAC therefore calls on governments in all countries to rectify this. Fair value for the use of creative works must be channeled back to the authors who created them, and not to the digital platforms that exploit legal loopholes to make money from them,” says Jean-Michel Jarre, President of CISAC.
CISAC Director General Gadi Oron makes the same call to world governments:
– Artists' management companies must have fair framework conditions in the form of a functioning market in order for them to be able to license their repertoires. The current situation is far from fair. Many digital platforms that dominate content distribution use outdated laws or legal loopholes to avoid paying remuneration to creators, and accumulate enormous revenue based on the authors. This unfair situation must be corrected.
CISAC has seen a number of positive results in the global campaign for fair remuneration for creators over the past year. Together with a number of other artists' organisations, its work has helped to give screenwriters for television and film the right to earn remuneration in Chile and Colombia, which greatly contributes to the livelihood of these professionals in these countries. CISAC has also seen progress in the work to give visual artists the right to receive a share of the proceeds when galleries and auction houses resell their art. Momentum for its international implementation is growing following the first full-day conference dedicated to this topic at the UN agency WIPO in April 2017.
Read more about CISAC at cisac.org
CISAC's annual report was published on June 8, and can be read here.