PLR in Spain

spain

As an EU Member State, Spain had an obligation to set up a PLR system to meet the requirements of the 1992 Lending Right Directive.

The Directive was transposed into Spanish law by Law 43/1994 of 30 December 1994 on rental right and lending right and on certain rights related to copyright in the field of intellectual property (BOE no 313, 31 December 1994, p. 39504).

The Spanish government’s policy of accepting the Directive in principle but excluding all public libraries from any lending right for authors was declared by the European Court on October 26, 2006 to be an ‘improper’ implementation. The aforementioned decision was a declaratory Judgment, therefore no fine was imposed to the Spanish State.

Due to the European Court’s Judgment, and to avoid a possible fine, the Spanish Government had to transpose this right correctly as soon as possible. At the same time, a new law on reading, books and libraries was drafted by Government and the final version was sent to the Parliament on November 3, 2006. As at that time the decision of the European Court had not been announced and the draft did not include anything on public lending right.

But after having heard the decision of the Court, the government decided include an amendment in order to introduce public lending right into Spanish legislation.

So, a new provision was included in the text of the legislation, the Intellectual Property Act of 2006, including this remuneration coming from public lending right.

The current Reading, Book, and Library Act was passed in June, 2007 (Ley 10/2007, de 22 de junio, de la lectura, del libro y de las bibliotecas). This contains the amendment to the Intellectual Property Act in order to comply with the Directive.

PLR will be introduced in two steps:

As an urgent measure, and in order to avoid the EU fine, this law modifies the Intellectual Property Law in order to set up on the basis for the introduction of public lending right in Spain.

But the complete introduction of PLR will be done by a Decree and should be approved in a year after the law on reading books and libraries comes into force (before July, 2008).

(updated JULY 2008)