2023-07-12 13:04:46
The publishing sector launched an almost desperate cry for help this Wednesday due to the increase in piracy and the poor contribution to the copyright system. According to a report submitted by the Spanish Center for Reprographic Rights (Cedro), The Spanish publishing industry suffers from a situation of competitive disadvantage compared to other European countries. The consequence, warned the general director of Cedro, Jorge Corrales, is that these circumstances the sustainability of the publishing sector is being “compromised”. And, with this, the very “written culture and democratic health of Spain” is also compromised.
The study prepared by the association that is in charge of managing the intellectual property rights of authors and publishers of books, magazines, newspapers and sheet music details that visits to illegal pages that share editorial content have grown by almost 60 percent in the last year . The trend has been upward since 2017, something that has been exacerbated by the growing expansion of instant messaging applications and social networks: WhatsApp, Telegram, Twitter, Facebook…
The most recent and striking case is that of the magazine ‘Hola’, whose latest issue, the exclusive on the wedding of Tamará Falcó and Íñigo Onieva, has been massively pirated. The magazine plans to denounce Meta, owner of WhatsApp, but the path is usually tortuous. Corrales acknowledged that in recent years they have not been able to close the groups that share illegal content on this platform: “Very little progress has been made, we would need much more collaboration for the platform or, where appropriate, for legislative support to be given to us in the style than has been provided to right holders in Italy’.
Javier Diaz de Olarte, Cedro’s legal director, denounced the “impunity with which these platforms have acted in the past”, and the general director claimed to give “immediate coverage” to the contents of newspapers, magazines or book publishers. Corrales recalled the case of Prince Harry’s book, which was also massively pirated. Spanish-speaking Internet users (Spanish and Latin American) are at the forefront in piracy: they consume 15 percent more illegal content than other countries in the world.
What leads users to pirate content? The ‘Observatory for the Sustainability of Written Culture’, prepared by Julio Cervino and Hector Jimenez, explains that it is done mainly for convenience. It is so easy to get pirated books or newspapers through WhatsApp or Telegram that many do it even knowing that it is wrong. Other times it is because there is a lack of truthful information, because citizens do not know how to identify whether a specific content is legal or not. Be that as it may, this has nothing to do with the income level of the users or with their cultural demand: according to the report, the greater the cultural development and greater wealth, the greater the piracy. curious paradox.
In addition to piracy, the competitive disadvantage of the Spanish publishing industry is also explained by the lack of remuneration for the reuse of the authors’ works. In other words, what the creators receive for the use of their content, be it photocopies, reproductions or digitizations, is insufficient. The average rate in Spain for the reuse of editorial content is 38.25 percent lower than the European average. In other words, the average per capita remuneration for the reuse of content in the publishing sector is €1.52/year, while in Spain it is €0.48/year.
“Users, both in the public and private sectors, are not adequately remunerating authors and publishers for the reuse of their content,” said Corrales, CEO of Cedro. Because from the public sector the situation in Spain is also worse compared to the rest of the European countries. While the average remuneration in the public sector is 55.82 percent, in Spain it is 7.5 percent. With current rates, the Spanish publishing sector collects 6.63 million euros; if the neighboring countries were homologated, the collection would amount to 44.67 million; with the average European rate, at 72.34 million.
The damage is great. Cedro lists the consequences of this competitive disadvantage: less income for authors, less investment for new titles, fewer jobs, fewer resources to collect royalties, unequal conditions with other countries, less investment for the generation of cultural content. and educational… «Cedro’s objective is to make proposals to the Administration and civil society so that the level of legal, economic and social recognition of our rights reaches the levels of neighboring countries and also serves as a reference, to our brothers in Latin America,” said Carmen Rierapresident of the association.
The writer Manuel Vilas and the general director of Anaya, martha martinez, read a series of possible solutions to get around this scenario. Among them, that the Administration lead this process and that an organization with powers and resources be created to fight against piracy. (The law of the Spanish Copyright and Related Rights Office, which was expected to be approved around this time to address this problem, fell by the wayside with the electoral advance). “We are talking about money,” said Vilas, who regretted that his books are all on the web: “You just have to put my name and the title, and you download it. It’s sad. The word sustainability means future, money well earned.
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