Between 6 and 8 September, Sofia (“Société Française des Intérêts des Auteurs de l'Écrit” - French Society for the Interests of Authors of the Written word) hosted in Paris the VIIth international conference on lending rights. This was attended by 28 delegations - from Europe of course, but also from Canada and Australia.
The conference was an opportunity to assess the situation of lending rights across the world. Sometimes these are based on the copyright tradition by establishing a right to additional payments to authors of works lent or purchased by libraries, sometimes they recognise the legitimacy of an agreed advantage to authors under lending rights and set up a system to support primarily literary creativity, and finally they sometimes combine these concepts so that direct payments made to rights holders are associated with a deduction to fund social aspects. Some systems extend lending rights to audio media while others restrict the categories of works, primarily to those of imagination. Nations with a narrow linguistic catchment area give preference to authors writing in their language, while leaving room for translators residing within their territory. Some systems set aside a share of the payment for publishers, generally 30%; France is the exception here, allocating half.
 
In short, lending rights are a flexible and valuable tool in the deliberate policies formulated by nations towards book publishing. They also fall within the spirit of the UNESCO treaty on cultural diversity that came into force on 18 March 2007; they exemplify the fact that books ‘are not products like any others’ and that they still contribute uniquely to the values of a civilisation. Where public lending rights are applied, they represent a concrete expression of the attachment of nations to the defence of creative rights, in other words the full and free expression of talents.

This VIIth conference on public lending rights was also an opportunity to consider the electronic exploitation of books, which is disrupting traditional lending categories and reading practices in general. It summarised the state of the technologies and the initiatives already taken in this field by certain players who attended the conference with a view to developing their services in the face of developments in digital applications.

This VIIth conference concluded with a resolution reminding those EU states that had not yet introduced a public lending rights payment system or even transposed the directive dated 19 November 1992 concerning lending and rental rights of their obligations in this regard.

Resolution

Proceedings

Previous conference reports

Links

> plrinternational.com
The PLR International
Network website

> la-sofia.org
Le site institutionnel
de Sofia