Stowarzyszenie Filmowców Polskich
SFP
Zdania SFP: • reprezentowanie interesów środowiska filmowego w Polsce i zagranicą; • obrona interesów moralnych, prawnych i materialnych polskich twórców filmowych; • zbiorowe zarządzanie i ochrona praw autorskich i pokrewnych; • współpraca z instytucjami i organami administracji publicznej w sprawach ważnych dla kinematografii i branży audiowizualnej; • promocja polskiego kina i upowszechnianie jego dorobku w Polsce i na świecie; • wspieranie projektów naukowych i edukacyjnych z dziedziny filmu; • współudział w prawidłowym kształtowaniu stosunków między twórcami a producentami Więcej na https://www.sfp.org.pl/wydarzenia,343,24245,22,1,Stowarzyszenie-Filmowcow-Polskich.html
ID: 122158812891-33
Lobbying Activity
Response to Evaluation of the Geo-blocking Regulation
11 Mar 2025
ZAPA is the Polish Collective Management Organization of Audiovisual Authors and Producers. It is a member of AGICOA, EUROCOPYA, CISAC, SAA and also Kreatywna Polska, which is a Polish Association promoting and defending various creative industries interests. The European audiovisual sector is territorial, and there is no single European market for the exploitation of works. There are significant cultural, linguistic, economic differences between countries, whose audience may have different preferences and needs to be reached by different methods of film promotion. Financing the creation of works often requires production support from individual national distributors. It is not the case that there must be only one correct pan-European model. The audiovisual industry representing 47 billion and over 2 million jobs strongly disagrees on possible inclusion in the scope of the Regulation as its entire economic structure relies on territorial exclusivity which is not the case of economic goods and services. Regulation, contrary to position of the Commission, will not bring benefits and simplifications, neither for consumers nor for market participants involved in the distribution of legally protected content. The regulation will only benefit large transnational players, and its functioning will pose a very serious threat to the local creative content markets, which will directly affect not only producers, authors, artists but also broadcasters and distributors. Prohibition of geo-blocking will cause a dynamic growth of consolidation processes in Europe. It will entail the necessity to acquire licenses covering the entire European Union. For entities from smaller markets, like Poland, the acquisition of pan-European licenses will prove too costly, which will result in an increase in the importance of content offered by foreign entities. Further to various impact analysis, restricting territorial exclusivity by banning geoblocking in the AV sector would reduce the economic value of the rights in question, which would have a direct and negative impact on financing and distribution opportunities, as well as on the return on investment. It would also have a negative impact on consumers situation, resulting in less choice of content, distribution and access options, as well as higher prices. The impact of including AV in the EU Geo-blocking Regulation, by Oxera (https://www.oxera.com/insights/reports/the-impact-of-including-av-in-eu-geoblocking-regulation/), indicates that erosion of territorial exclusivity would have a significant short-term impact on industry and consumers, with up to 9.3bn of welfare lost per annumas well as medium- to long-term outcomes that would be worse than they are today (a welfare loss of up to 4.5bn per year). The inevitable consolidation of the content distribution market will not only seriously weaken the local AV markets, but may also significantly reduce the number of original works of a number of countries offered to the public. It cannot be expected that global players active on the European market will make it their main goal to popularize local content. As a result, we can expect a depletion of the offer for local consumers. The inclusion of the exploitation of copyrighted goods in the geo-blocking ban will therefore have a number of negative consequences: a significant deterioration in the operating conditions of domestic creative industries, a threat to the range of products available to consumers, and an inevitable increase in prices. This is why ZAPA together with over 700 organisations and entities across Europe calls for the unquestionable exclusion of audiovisual services from the Geo-blocking Regulation- 2023 Joint Statement (chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://www.ivf-video.org/_files/ugd/7bf01a_366b3550245444229c3d4b27ae06a393.pdf)
Read full responseMeeting with Joanna Scheuring-Wielgus (Member of the European Parliament)
18 Sept 2024 · Priorities of the cultural sector for the upcoming parliamentary term
Response to Digital Services Act: deepening the Internal Market and clarifying responsibilities for digital services
31 Mar 2021
The Polish Filmmakers Association – Union of Audiovisual Authors and Producers (SFP-ZAPA) would like to thank the European Commission for organising consultations on the extremely important matter of the future of digital services. The legal regulation of intermediary services that offer products and services online and base their activities on using third party content is at the moment very selective and not adapted to the digital and technological reality, which is subject to constant change.
Such inadequate state of legislation principally comes from the fact that the last European Union's legal act covering this matter comprehensively was created in 2000. Although other regulations, for example on copyright, also covered the matter indirectly, legislative initiatives presented by the European Commission on 15 December 2020 provide the first occasion for a wider debate how to restructure the regulatory environment of digital platforms. It is no longer possible to perceive those entities as micro enterprises entering the market or start-ups discovering new space for development of their products. Today, the activities of the majority of large platforms definitely go beyond the area of passive provision of hosting services which means that also the legal framework needs an update. The most important element of the proposed Regulation should therefore be an express conclusion in Article 5 that it is possible to invoke the liability exemptions only when the activity of the platform is limited to the technical process of operating and giving access to a communication network and is of mere automatic and passive nature. In order to be able to release itself from liability for storing and making available content, the entity providing information society services may not have any control over such content.
The next pillar for regulating the liability of online intermediaries the mechanism for removal of illegal content. Notice and action notification systems, although helpful, turn out to be insufficient in fighting infringements of rights. Most of the websites already today, in the event of receiving a notice from rightholders, remove links to illegal content. The essence of the problem is, however, that after a short time successive links or accounts appear, and notices about the necessity of their removal must be sent again, which makes the entire process highly ineffective and costly. Those problems could be solved by adopting, at the European level, certain measures that make it impossible for users to repeatedly place illegal content – a take down and stay down mechanism. The fact that the Proposal decides to adopt only the notice and action system creates a huge disproportion between the situation of authors and other rightholders and the rights of information society services whose business model is based on using third party creative output.
Notwithstanding the above, we would like to emphasise that since the beginning of works on the Digital Services Act, SFP-ZAPA has supported the assumption followed by the European Commission when drafting commented provisions, i.e. rebalance the rights and responsibilities of users, rightholders, intermediary platforms, and public authorities in the online world. Unfortunately, the final effect of the Digital Services Act seems to favour the position of the platforms, ignoring the interests of other market participants, especially the creative sector.
Please find attached more w detailed comments on the DSA. At the same time, we note that we are willing to cooperate with the European Commission during further stages of works.
Read full responseMeeting with Anna Herold (Digital Economy)
28 Jan 2016 · copyright