Payment of the Royalties by Means of a Private Copy

The president of the Culture and Film Commission of the Chamber of Deputies has taken up the proposal to add to the Federal Copyright Act the concept of payment of royalties by private copy, that is to say, manufacturers and importers of electronic telephony and computer devices would be obliged to compensate the creators of works for private copies of their works.

But what is private copying? Private copying or copying for personal use is the reproduction, compaction, storage or copying of artistic or literary works, editions, phonograms, videograms and broadcasts of lawful origin, protected by the Federal Copyright Act (LFDA), carried out for one time only and not for profit for the personal and private use of the person who performs it.

However, that in some International Treaties and national regulations, private copy is allowed for personal use without payment of royalties, provided it is for a single occasion and without a commercial purpose, due to agility, to the ease and high quality with which copies and distribution of works are made nowadays, thanks to digital technologies, mainly Authors and Related Rights Holders, around the world, they have expressed their concern about the least economic outcome of these practices, so, the concept of paying royalties by private copy has been used in other regulations such as the French and the Spanish, calling it the Digital Canon, to compensate authors for any reproduction of their digital non-profit works.

In Mexico, the Federal Copyright Act (LFDA) stipulates in its article 40, the prerogative of the holders of the Copyright and Related Rights to demand a compensatory remuneration for the realization of any copy or reproduction made without their authorization and without being protected by the law as an exception or limitation to the property right.

However, neither the amounts nor the subjects are stipulated, limiting to the Authors, to Holders of Related Rights and Collecting Societies as they are unable to collect remuneration from manufacturers and importers of communication technology products such as smartphones, virgin material media such as USB sticks and Cds, media players and computations, photocopiers, scanners, players, etc. and thus motivating the proposal of addiction to the law of paying royalties for private copy.

Among the organizations that support the inclusion of this figure are the Society of Authors and Composers of Mexico (SACM), the National Association of Actors (ANDA), the National Association of Interpreters (ANDI), the Mexican Academy of Arts and Film Sciences (AMACC), Mexican Association of Producers of Phonograms and Videograms (Amprofon), the General Society of Writers of Mexico (Sogem) and the National Chamber of the Mexican Publishing Industry (Caniem).

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