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Everyone’s down on collecting societies
By CMU Editorial | Published on Thursday 30 July 2009
Everyone hates the collecting societies today. The public prosecutor in Belgium has accused the country’s publishing collecting society, SABAM, of failing to properly distribute royalty revenues back to their members – ie the content owners – and the society and five of its executives are now likely to be charged with forgery and abuse of confidence.
The prosecutor is reportedly set to pounce after a three year investigation into the society’s financial procedures which, according to Billboard, showed up “deficient organisation and structure, hazy distribution and a lack of internal controls”. It’s not clear if some are accused of actually using the shambles to act fraudulently, or whether the case is more about failure to fulfil some sort of fiduciary duty.
The society’s spokesman, Thierry Dachelet, played down the pending prosecution, stressing that SABAM had assisted the country’s justice department in its investigations, and that considerable restructuring had already begun.
Billboard quote Dachelet thus: “We haven’t yet received an official notice from the prosecutor’s office and I prefer not to comment on the prosecutor’s accusations while we are not aware of any details. [But, while] human mistakes cannot be ignored, is this fraud? A hearing in chambers will decide whether this case will be ruled in court”.Elsewhere in the word of European collecting societies, the German publishing royalty body GEMA is the subject of a petition posted on the website of the lower house of the German parliament, the Bundestag. 106,000 people have already signed it.
The petition precedes a planned investigation into the operations of the collecting society this Autumn, which will look into allegations that GEMA breached the country’s copyright laws, and even acted unconstitutionally. It looks likely one political party in the Bundestag, the CDU/CSU, will propose new laws to impose restrictions on GEMA which, the political types say, would protect the interests of both the collecting society’s members and those who licence the songs the body represents.
The campaign against GEMA has seemingly stemmed from criticism of it made by the MD of a cultural centre in Sonthofen, Bavaria. Monkia Bestle says the body is unfair in its treatment of smaller concert promoters in Germany, telling reporters: “Over many years, concert promoters and artists have become so frustrated that we plan to set up a self-help group to monitor GEMA”.
