The Ministry of Culture and National Heritage wants to update the list of so-called “clean media.” To this end, on Wednesday it launched a 30-day public consultation on a draft amendment to the regulation on reprographic fees.
The reprographic levy, or fee for so-called “blank media”—e.g., blank CDs, flash drives, or hard drives—is a way to reward creators for allowing their works to be legally copied for personal use, such as at home. Thanks to this levy, artists, writers, and musicians receive some compensation for private copying of their works. Such compensation is required by European Union law, but there is no single mandated form. In Poland, this mechanism has been in place since 1994. It was last updated in 2008, when notebooks, pocket video cameras, and e-book readers were becoming increasingly popular.
According to the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage, revenues from reprographic fees in Poland are among the lowest in Europe , which is a consequence of the existence of outdated regulations in this area, which still consider tape recorders, video recorders, faxes, MP3 players and CD recorders to be “blank media”.
As the ministry noted in its press release, technology and the digital reality have changed radically over the past 17 years, and the regulation on reprographic fees still includes such “blank media” as VHS, MP3, fax and DVD recorders.
The Ministry of Culture and National Heritage wants to balance the trade in devices with extended functions, realign the fees by introducing a 1% fee for all new devices and lowering it to a maximum of 2% for other devices, and simplifying the system by, among other things, reducing the number of devices and media covered by the fee from 65 to 19. It also proposes collecting the fee directly from device manufacturers and importers.
The Ministry of Culture estimates that thanks to the amendment, artists could receive an additional PLN 150-200 million each year.
zzp/ aszw/
