At the Kultura Cinema in Warsaw, the so-called royalty crisis staff. As you can guess, the participants of this group want to oppose the changes announced by the ministry.
The Ministry of Culture and National Heritage has proposed changes that will deprive creators of royalties from the Internet. A representative of the creators and actors appeared in the Sejm today to take part in a press conference.
The project concerned the implementation of a directive introducing changes to copyright and related rights in the digital space, but it did not regulate the issue of royalties for filmmakers. As it turns out, Poland is the only country in the European Union that does not regulate this issue.
“The protesters clearly negatively assess the deletion of statutory royalties for filmmakers for the exploitation of their works on the Internet from the draft. The justification presented by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage is unacceptable,” we can read in a letter to the Ministry.
What will we find in the list? Here are selected fragments, and you can read the full text here.
“(…) The current proposal of the law does not provide us with a decent future, but completely ruins it. Internet royalties are our ‘to be or not to be’. (…)”
“(…) No one appreciates the power of the Internet as a distribution infrastructure more than we do, which is a new and important field of exploitation that allows our productions to reach viewers around the world, and that is why we want to receive the remuneration we deserve in the form of royalties proportional to the successes achieved through our films and series. (…)”
“(…) We believe that you will take our position into account in the work on the act and will restore the provisions on royalties for the exploitation of audiovisual works on the Internet to the draft, because you care about young filmmakers. We do not want to be another group condemned to economic emigration to countries that respect our right to receive royalties from the Internet. We are educated in Poland, with Polish taxpayers’ money. We want to live and work in Poland. We want the revenues from our productions to remain in the bloodstream of the Polish economy. This is our common interest. (. ..)”