License needed for guests to play songs?

Property & Home
1

Article in The Times - Anyone come across this? Implications? What music? What if my guests only listen to US or UK songs?

Owners of holiday rentals in France have expressed outrage after being told to pay an annual fee to enable their guests to listen to songs.

The row comes after the French Society of Authors, Composers and Musical Publishers (Sacem) decided that any holiday rental with a radio, a television or a CD player was liable for the €224 fee.

Failure to pay could leave the owners facing a fine of up to €300,000, according to lawyers.

Under French law, organisations that broadcast music in public are required to pay a licensing fee to Sacem which passes about 90 per cent of the money it collects to song composers and performers.

Last year the society collected €357.9 million from online broadcasts, €296.9 million from television and radio stations and €401.6 million from other sources.

2

Poor journalism as ever. As far as I know there has been no change to the SACEM rules, just more pushing of them.

We used to be sent stuff to sign up, which we ignored. And nothing ever happened. My reading of the rules is that it is only if whatever you are playing is for “the public”. A communal area in a chambre d’hôte is public, a rented gîte is not.

6 Likes
3

Bless you Jane. I can stop worrying. :slight_smile:

4

I think as Jane says, you’re unlikely to get caught but their guidance does say that gîtes aren’t excluded. The tariff is based on the number of bedrooms, and it’s less than €100 per year of you’ve got less than 10 bedrooms.

Up to you whether to pay or not, but I think talk of a €300,000 is designed purely to scare people… That’s a ridiculously huge markup over the annual charge. Maybe if the Stade de France didn’t pay then fair enough :slightly_smiling_face:

Screenshot_2022-07-18-13-13-41-29_e2d5b3f32b79de1d45acd1fad96fbb0f
Screenshot_2022-07-18-13-13-41-29_e2d5b3f32b79de1d45acd1fad96fbb0f2400×1080 206 KB

5

Thanks Gareth. We have two bedrooms. :slight_smile:

1 Like
6

Again it says “covers diffusion in the rooms and communal areas”. I will try to find the source I read but basically SACAM can legally charge for diffusion in public (aka communal) spaces. So it is weasel words as gîtes have no communal spaces, but they way they link the two avoids the question.

I have just had a quick peek online, and they are obviously doing a media campaign at the moment!

And “less than €100 a year” is roughly the profit from a week’s rental outside high season. So it is a signifiant sum!

1 Like
7

It’s also a significant sum to those who make the music let’s not forget, especially in these times where they’re trying to pay their bills while earning $0.0033 per stream on Spotify, so if we’d like them to keep doing it and can afford to pay it, let’s pay it! Perhaps we can’t afford to voluntarily, but maybe some can.

2 Likes
8

It all comes down to whether or not there has been a “communication to the public” as understood by the EU Enforcement Directive transposed into French law.

There is a whole body of evolving case law on the question of what, and when, a person (natural or body corporate) has committed an unauthorised act of “communication to the public” of a copyrighted work.

This might be a helpful read of a summary of the caselaw at the EU level, and what that means with regard to the owner or gite, or a “louer de meublé de tourisme”.

EDIT for correction to initial comment : At least some of the agents of the SACEM are assermentés, and therefore considered equivalent to a police officer. Recent case law confirms that they can enter private premises in the execution of their mission without having to declare who they are.

EDIT: further information: a question about the practices of the SACEM with regard to gites was raised in 2019 in the French parliament. The answer by the then minister for culture is given here.

“Les exploitants individuels de chambres d’hôtes ou de gîte qui procèdent à des diffusions musicales dans les chambres, les parties communes ou les espaces où un service de petit déjeuner est assuré pour la seule clientèle de l’établissement, et quel que soit le moyen de diffusion (radio, télévision), sont ainsi soumis au règlement des droits d’auteurs et des droits voisins auprès de la SACEM.”

9

That 300KE is a veiled threat of the maximum potential fine from the French court (the SACEM have basically just copied the relevant passage from the Intellectual Property code) IF the SACEM were to take you to court for copyright infringement that they could prove, and if they won their case, bearing in mind that it would be extremely unlikely that any IP court in France would pronounce such a fine (except for egregious cases of copyright infringement) against a gîte owner.

2 Likes
10

The recent EU case law in the car radio case (rental agency with long term lease cars got sued by a different EU member collecting rights society) stated that the provision of the technical means (i.e. providing the equipment) was not in and of itself sufficient to meet the criteria required for “unauthorised communication to the public”. A further conscious act of deliberateness by the distributor of the copyrighted work is required.

2 Likes
11

It’s basically designed to be a deterrent, not unlike the 15k€ fine for each undeclared foreign bank account…
but how the hell do you stop holidaymakers from playing music on their mobile devices? I certainly understand the “broadcast” comment… that would be a different matter altogether and not unlike the issue faced by bars and restaurants in controlling customers playing content on their mobiles - quite different to the said enterprise playing music with the intention of “entertaining” their clientele, as I see it.
EDIT: my post and @RicePudding later post crossed…

1 Like
12

TLDR : if you knowingly pipe music, or make available copyrighted works in any of the communal areas of your establishment (e.g. data repository accessible over the local network), or in the bedrooms, then potentially you are committing an unauthorised communication to the public of those works, and would potentially be liable for payment of the fee. The actual provision of devices (TVs, CD players, DVD players, etc) is not in and of itself sufficient to constitute unauthorised communication to the public.

2 Likes
13

Ah, that’s interesting to know. Thanks :slight_smile:

14

In principle, a customer who streams content to their own device using their own streaming service (paid or otherwise) is entirely liable for any acts of infringement they might commit.

The liability (or non-liability) of providers of the technical measures to access that content is a whole different set of case law :wink: - if you have a few hours to spare, you can read up on the current state of affairs of safe harbours within the EU commerce directive and copyright. Suffice it to say, copyright holders (read, large media corporations and collecting societies) are pushing for ever greater restrictions to the application of safe harbour provisions for service providers. Any chink or lack of detail/clarity in any of the EU Directives in relation to copyright and its enforcement inevitably seems to end up in a referral to the EUCJ.

15

But again they link chambres and parties communes. I remain unconvinced that a gîte with no parties commune, and no piped music in the bedrooms is included.

I do entirely agree that the rights of authors should be upheld, and that breach of copyright is important. But there are limits! A gîte is a holiday HOME, and so what is the difference between watching TV at home and watching in a gîte? As long as the TV licence is paid I don’t feel there should be further things imposed.

2 Likes
16

Indeed, but what’s the legal position in France for a gîte owner who leave a DVD player and a few DVDs in the property?

17

They are not diffusing anything, so can’t be held liable.

Illegal use of the internet is a much tricker issue. Our terms and conditions do state that this shouldn’t be used for unlawful activities, but I am not sure that would hold up as I don’t know how I would prove it was a guest, not me.

Had a problem with our rented flat, where we provided the internet (as we use it ourselves) as were constantly hauled up for breach of copyright/illegal streaming. Eventually had to insist the tenants/lodgers provided their own.

18

Are you sure?

Plucking a random DVD from the shelf behind me I find the following, in microscopic text:

There’s a lot of stuff that you aren’t doing there but it looks like it has been drafted to catch just about any activity which isn’t family viewing, including lending to a paying guess so that they can watch it.

Proof would be the tricky part, I suspect, as you say just having it laying around would not, one presumes, be sufficient your guest would have to be “caught in the act” as it were.

Actually that one is easy, though I couldn’t promise it would be 100% legally sound (I am not a lawyer etc) and it’s a bit technical but a) get a VPN subscription b) set up your Internet & Wi-Fi such that it has at least two SSIDs - one for you and one for the guests/tenants.

The latter needs to be set up so that it routes through the VPN only.

This would have two consequences - the first being that you won’t get the breach of copyright notice in the first place. The second is that even if you do, and the IP address associated with the download/upload/nefarious activity was that of the VPN you could show that it was the guest, not you.

But insisting tat tenants sort their own internet access seems to be the safest solution all round.

19

The legislator, and the courts, already consider that distribution of copyrighted works to bedrooms in a commercial establishment is an act of communication of those works which requires consent of the author/creator. The government has brought gîtes, chambres d’hôte and the like under the same “commercial establishment” umbrella as bars, hotels, etc. If the establishment has no “parties communes”, nor private rooms, in which those works are communicated to the public, then it seems unlikely that there will be a case to answer. That wouldn’t IMHO stop the SACEM from pursuing the issue before the courts just to make a point if it felt it could, and judging from the government’s response to the question posed, the legislator didn’t care back in 2019. Perhaps the current government minister for culture might take a different view.

The SACEM tend to lean on their “mission de service public” to engage in somewhat questionable campaigns, and they are but one collecting society among the 22 officially recognised organisations for copyright and neighbouring rights management in France:

https://www.culture.gouv.fr/Thematiques/Propriete-litteraire-et-artistique/Conseil-superieur-de-la-propriete-litteraire-et-artistique/Liens-utiles/Organismes-de-gestion-collective

Similarly, the Centre Français de la Copie is doing the rounds of a number of seemingly increasingly wider professional circles with regards to declaration and payment of annual fees for storing, and making available to clients, staff, etc, 3rd party digital content relating to publications such as magazines, newspapers (and newspaper articles), journals, etc. Making these available digitally within a commercial establishment also falls under the auspices of communication to the public.

Politically, France sees itself as a champion of copyright in Europe and the world, it is also one of the EU states spearheading a campaign for a reduction in the safe harbour exceptions to liability for service providers. What this indicates is that the French government is unlikely to withdraw its support for the SACEM, even if it is seen to be exceeding the legal limits of its purview.

No doubt, the only way that this behaviour would be resolved one way or another would for an aggrieved party to take the SACEM to court, in the hope of getting a referral to the EUCJ. It seems fairly unlikely that the owner of a gîte or chambre d’hôte would have the means to do this, and that’s pretty much what the SACEM is banking on.

20

The question is whether or not the act of providing DVDs is an act of “unauthorised communication to the public”, in this case, within the framework of a business activity.

I can see both sides of the argument, but given the current judicial and political context, it probably would be. A similar question could be raised as to whether the provision of books and magazines also constitutes an unauthorised communication to the public. Again, in principle, yes, it probably would, especially if it could be argued that the act in question relates to a “new” public. The definition of “new public” is one that has been developed by the EUCJ, and has no definition in the statutes (yet, to my knowledge).