The Bookseller.com

2nd December 2008

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ALCS checks on EU ruling

28.07.08 Keith Nuthall

Britain's Authors' Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS) has contacted the European Commission to establish whether its agreements with other collecting societies in Europe are legal, after a landmark European Commission ruling.

Following an anti-trust inquiry into music collecting societies, Brussels has ordered that these national organisations stop preventing rights holders from registering with another country's collecting society. And it has ruled that bilateral agreements between societies preventing them offering music licences outside their national territories are also illegally anti-competitive under EU free market rules.

Although the ruling is limited to music rights (and so only directly affecting audio-book publishers within the publishing sector), the legal principles laid down by the Commission could theoretically be used to attack a similar system of bilateral deals involving literary collecting societies, such as the ALCS and the Publishers Licensing Society (PLS). These entail continental collecting societies licensing organisations for the secondary use of British literary works, such as photocopying or scanning, and feeding the money back to the UK organisations who distribute the proceeds to publishers and writers.

Speaking to The Bookseller, ALCS head of rights and licensing Richard Combes said: "We've contacted the Commission's competition directorate and said this is what we are doing and is our standard arrangement. Are you happy with it?" He added: "We hope the Commission is reasonable" and would not object, saying he considered the current system of guaranteed regular payments "is worth preserving".

Combes would oppose "the break up of a system in place for many years that's delivered for creators." If this happened, "one would be concerned creators' distribution would be damaged and they might not receive the same level of return as in the past".

That said, his organisation "would not stand in anyone's way" if they wanted to register with a foreign EU collecting society. But he added: "It would be difficult an individual on their own, but if they wanted to join the French society [for example] there's nothing we would do to stand in their way."

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