2024-03-10 10:54:54
“Instead of moving forward, we are turning back, with an anachronistic and outdated understanding of the functioning of the market, which can indulgently be characterized as completely foreign to modern European governance,” he notes.
We express the strong dissatisfaction and indignation of the hotel industry after the publication of a Draft Law by the Ministry of Culture, which includes a provision that imposes a specific quota on the public performance of Greek-language songs or their orchestral musical performance, in the common areas of hotels, for the purported protection of the yard of cultural heritage, emphasizes the XEE in its announcement.
XEE respects and accepts throughout time the intellectual and relative right notes. That is why he led a huge effort to enter into memorandums of cooperation with 8 of the 9 Collective Rights Management Organizations. In addition, at the initiative of XEE, an electronic platform was created, where each hotelier now knows what he has to pay and to which institution. Especially with 5 of the 8 OSD (Self-Management, Television Rights, Dias, Hermeias, Iridanos), the platform connects and updates their own system, in order to proceed with sending the relevant invoice to the hotels. After the extremely successful operation of the platform, through which more than 8,449 agreements have been concluded between OSDs and hotels from 2019 until today, the management of XEE is in a spirit of cooperation in negotiations with the other OSDs – except one – for the inclusion them on that particular platform.
At the same time, it is a permanent position of the XEE that a holistic regulation of the matter is carried out by a legislative initiative of the State. Regulation to deal with the pathologies of the past but also ridiculous situations such as when after the dissolution of AEPI, the two organizations, which shared the represented repertoire, demanded in writing from our members both 80% of AEPI’s dues, resulting in hotels to be asked to pay at least 160% of AEPI’s fees!
We have been asking for years and through a series of interventions, an arrangement in line with the European standard. Each user shall pay a single organization a total fee for all rights and this organization shall be responsible for distributing it to collective rights management organizations (CMOs), according to their percentage of representation, their fees in relation to the their represented repertoires.
Instead of responding to this immense need, the proposed non-enforceable provision of the Ministry of Culture not only does not resolve the issue but creates an additional burden on hotel businesses, blatantly ignoring the importance of Greek tourism and its contribution to the economy and society. Instead of moving forward, we are turning back, with an anachronistic and outdated understanding of the functioning of the market, which can be indulgently described as completely foreign to modern European governance.
On this basis, we request the immediate intervention of the Minister of Tourism Mrs. Olga Kefalogianni for the withdrawal of the provision in question and the substantial treatment of the issue through a legislative initiative, which will express a real will to reform in a European direction.
Source euro2day.gr