Adami holding reserve funds for US claims

You will recall that further to the legal dispute between RAAP and PPI, the EU Court of Justice ruled that the application of Directive 2006/115/EC 6 does not allow member states to exclude non-EU rightsholders (e.g. US artists) from neighboring rights payments.

Following the court’s decision, the Netherlands have changed their legislation thus enabling US artists to collect neighbouring rights going forward. In other countries legislation hasn’t been changed and thus the local collecting societies have not seen fit to change their distribution method. So materially almost nothing seems to have changed for US artists. However, in France some measures have been taken.

According to French law only phonograms fixated in the European Union (and other countries which operate basically in the same way as France) are eligible for neighbouring rights remuneration. The result is that phonograms from the US are This arrangement leads to exclude from the benefit of this distribution, regardless of nationality, holders of rights who participated in the fixation of phonograms in third countries which are not parties to these conventions, or which have expressed reservations thereto.

The equitable remuneration being collected, according to article L 214-1 of the CPI, on all the phonograms exploited in France, the sums received by Adami for the use of non-eligible phonograms are considered as “irredistributable” within the meaning of Article L 324-17, 2° of the CPI. They are allocated to the resources of the artistic action aimed at financing actions provided for in the first paragraph of Article L.324-17 of the Intellectual Property Code.

However, given the uncertainty surrounding this allocation, a provision for the same amount has been counted. The sums concerned and provisioned in 2020 represented €6,311,789 and those provisioned in for the 2021 financial year, €4,848,062.