El Drot De Pret

Levy

Payment

PLR in the world

Book suppliers and lending organisations - Procedures for registration and submitting returns

Personal copy

Reprography

Retraite

PLR

Background

PLR were enshrined in Council Directive 92/100/EEC of 19 November 1992 (see OJEC n°L346, 27 November 1992, pages 61-66) on rental right and lending right. In its first article, this recognises the right to allow or prevent the loan or originals or copies. This directive was intended to harmonise national legislation enacted in the field of PLR relating to works held in libraries, recognising that certain member States of the European Union had already introduced national arrangements including, many years previously, Denmark, Norway, Finland and Sweden, later joined by the United Kingdom, Austria and Germany, while others had not yet done so. In 2003 a PLR law was enacted in France. In 2008, 27 nations throughout the world had a system that remunerated the loan of books from libraries.

In Europe, to take account of national cultural and political objectives to promote reading, many countries introduced a range of systems for the public support of authors and translators, while others adopted a principle of remuneration paid in respect of an author’s rights (copyright). In the latter case, the remuneration of the author is determined by law and it is usually the State that provides the necessary funding, on behalf of readers, via a contribution voted annually by parliament. 

The legal licence regime, as in the French system, is an alternative allowed for under article 5 of Directive 92/100. Under this provision, the State may waive the exclusive right provided for public lending, provided at least the authors obtain remuneration in respect of this lending, with each nation retaining the ability to set this remuneration, taking due account of its cultural promotion targets. This text also enables the State to exempt certain categories of library from payment of the remuneration.

Late introduction of PLR in France

Until the adoption of the 1992 Directive, the French Government had for some time officially maintained that the law dated 11 March 1957 concerning literary and artistic property included adequate provisions that could be applied to PLR, a position that excused it from making any changes. Of course, PLR were not expressly covered in the then current legislation, but were included in the right to control destination, itself a corollary of the right to reproduction, in other words an author could, theoretically, on this basis, authorise or forbid the offering of his work for loan in a lending library.

The debate on PLR was re-launched on the initiative of the Society des Gens de letters (SGDL) in 1997. Madame Catherine Trautmann, then Minister for Culture, asked M. Jean-Marie Borzeix for a situation report on the matter; in June 1998, he submitted his Rapport sur la question du PLR dans les bibliothèques that was published in September 1998, giving rise to waves of protest amongst librarians, while being favourably received by rights holders represented by the Syndicat National de l’Édition (SNE) and the SGDL. This report favoured the system of exclusive rights by recommending the payment by the reader of a fixed sum of 10 to 20 Francs per year. It also stressed the need for solidarity between all those involved in the book publishing chain. The controversy set off by the librarians was supported a group of authors hostile to the payment of a fee by borrowers, both arguing in favour of free access to public reading.

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