Secretary General's April Digest, 2025
Judging by all the activity in a single month, my team and I feel it has been more like a whole quarter of a year! Let me share some of the highlights with you.
🎂 The SAA turns 15!
We started the month with the SAA General Assembly meeting. The members adopted a Strategic Plan for 2025-2027 and elected a new Board of Directors. We took the occasion to celebrate our 15th anniversary with members, current and past board members, staff and interns, all of whom we thanked for their contributions to the SAA over the years, with an exclusive get-together with fun quizzes and birthday cake! We are planning a larger public event later this year.
🎤 Patrons at our high-level events
We co-organised a side-event in Geneva, with CISAC and FESAAL for country delegates to the 46th session of the Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (SCCR) at WIPO. We invited filmmakers from three continents and copyright experts to discuss the lack of fair remuneration for audiovisual authors for the exploitation of their works, and the urgent need for a global mapping study on their rights and remuneration. I was happy that Emmanuelle Fournier-Lorentz, Swiss screenwriter and SAA Patron joined as one of the speakers. The event was a success, with 80 people attending in person and more than 130 people online (you can watch the recording here). Unfortunately, the side event and all the advocacy efforts were not enough. The proposal for a study was not adopted by the SCCR. It will therefore be discussed again at the 47th session in December.
Right after, an SAA delegation met with Glenn Micallef, the EU Commissioner in charge of Culture, to discuss authors’ rights and AI. We shared our views on the need to help authors receive fair remuneration for the use of their works. Commissioner Micallef listened attentively, stressed that audiovisual works have untapped potential for Europe's competitiveness and promised to raise his concerns on AI internally. For this occasion, we invited SAA Patron, Špela Čadež, to join us and share her testimony of being a Slovenian animation writer and director. Špela's analogy of AI being like compost was spot on: "It recycles existing works and creates the compost that can nourish new plants, growing from human creative works”.
The WIPO event and the Commissioner's meeting are both examples of how valuable SAA Patrons are to the SAA's work. Their powerful testimonials are what really get politicians and policy makers to stop, pay attention and listen (something they do not always do when we as 'lobbyists' try to get our messages across).
⏰ The ongoing saga of the General Purpose AI Code of Practice
Last week I attended the Polish EU Presidency Conference on the impact of AI on Copyright, Media and Creative sectors in Lódz, Poland.
Just to mention a few important words said during the conference: Dariusz Jablonski, President of the European Producers' Club, echoed the rightholders' perspective on the need for authorisation for the use of copyright-protected works. He emphasised the rightholders' community worries on the third draft of the General-Purpose AI Code of Practice. No code would be better than this flawed one. In another panel, Dominik Skoczek, Managing Director of our Polish member ZAPA and SAA board member, reminded that the EU Commission's broad interpretation of the text and data exception was enabling copyright infringement on a massive scale, in the sole financial interest of Big Tech. He highlighted that the opt-out was not working: AI companies do not respect it, and they also refuse licensing and negotiation.
Indeed, we have continued to make these points about the implementation of the EU AI Act, the behaviour of AI companies and the impact on authors. Together with a larger group of rightsholders’ organisations, we met with the Head of Cabinet of the Executive Vice-President Virkkunen and the Head of Cabinet of Executive Vice-President Ribera to share our concerns on the Code of Practice and transparency template. We recently learned that the EU Commission had postponed the publication of the final Code of Practice to give stakeholders more time to provide feedback (with no more details). In other words, the saga continues. Meanwhile, authors' works continue to be used by AI companies with no authorisation, remuneration and transparency...
🏆 Congratulations, Flow!
Yesterday, with my team we attended the ceremony of the LUX Audience Award in the European Parliament and congratulated Flow on winning this year's award. Ron Dyens, co-writer and producer of the film, took the award on behalf of the Latvian director, Gints Zilbalodis. The LUX Audience Award is adding on the many prizes already won by Flow (a €3,6m budget), in particular the Oscar of Best Animated Feature, in competition with American films with budgets over $200m.
Hopefully in May I will have the chance to see some more award-winning films as I will be going to the Cannes Film Festival.
Next week I will be taking a much-needed break, going to Florence, Italy with my family. I hope I will not succumb to the Florence syndrome which can overwhelm tourists with all its beauty!
Wishing you all a lovely and sunny May!
Tips
- Support Culture Action Europe's campaign "Ask, Pay, and Trust the Artist", calling on EU leaders to put culture at the heart of public policy. Culture contributes to the EU’s three main priorities: democracy, competitiveness, and security.