Anke Schierholz, VG Bild-Kunst, will be speaking at the seminar “What the Future Holds for Picture Agencies: Emerging Revenues from Collecting Societies”. The seminar is part of the CEPIC Congress Programme and will be held on 15th June 2017 from 14:15h to 15:45h in Berlin at the Martim ProArte Hotel, Friedrichstrasse 151, Salon 8, 12th floor.
Anke Schierholz is the Legal director of VG Bild-Kunst since 1999. VG Bild-Kunst is the German Collecting Management Organisation for the visual repertoire and picture agencies are members from the very beginning of collective rights management for visual works. Like publishers, they received a fixed percentage of the remuneration due for the uses of images under legal licenses. The larger part of the remuneration, however, is directly allocated to the photographers and payed out directly. After the European Court of Justice’s ruling in re Reprobel and the German Supreme court’s ruling in re “publishers´ share” (which both held that remuneration for legal licenses under the InfoSoc directive is due only to those right holders explicitly named in the directive), payment to agencies was not only stopped but German CMOs were forced by the supervision to recall all payments made in the previous there years. Anke will talk about the perspectives of common collective licenses in this legal environment.
