PLR in France

FRANCE

On March 7th 2005, SOFIA (Société Française des Intérêts des Auteurs de l’écrit) was accredited by the French Government to collect and distribute PLR payments.

The PLR Bill had been adopted on June 18th 2003 and came into effect on August 1st 2003. Authors and publishers will qualify for payment for the free lending of their books by public and private libraries, according to specific rules.

It is also hoped that the new French PLR regulations will have the effect of opening up access to the library book market for independent bookstores by prohibiting any discount rate exceeding 15 per cent on the fixed price of books in France.

The right is based on the number of copies of books bought by libraries and is equally shared between authors and publishers. A small part of it is granted to a new pension fund for writers and translators.

The annual global amount of the French PLR fund is estimated by the French Ministry of Culture to come to 22.6 million Euros. There are two sources of PLR funding:

Almost half of the funding derives from an annual flat-rate payment made by the State:

1.5 Euros payable for every member of the public registered with private and associative libraries (0.75 euro during the first year of implementation);
and 1 euro (0.5 euro during the first year) per student or scholar attending university libraries.

The other part comes from book suppliers. They will have to pay an amount of 6%on the tax free fixed price of the books bought by lending libraries of all kinds.

The right is to be managed by SOFIA, which has been recently accredited by the Ministry
of Culture. SOFIA fulfils all the required criteria:

Diversity of partners and an equitable representation of authors and
publishers;
Professionally qualified management team;
Appropriate level of investment for payment collection and distribution.

SOFIA has now developed an electronic management system to administer this new right with the support of the CFC (Centre Français d’Exploitation du Droit de Copie) and DILCOM. By October 2005, book suppliers and libraries had to register with the SOFIA website (www.la-sofia.org) all details (e.g. invoice, EAN13, number of copies, titles, Author(s) and publisher’s info) of books sold to libraries. This information will permit SOFIA to collect from the bookstores the amount of right due for PLR.

The government’s Centre National du Livre has boosted its subsidies to libraries. Thanks to this new provision, libraries have been able to maintain their acquisition capabilities and purchase high quality books.