mandatory collective management

Pursuant to copyright law, the following rights are subject to mandatory management by a collective management organisation: retransmission, private copy, public reception, reprography, rental, educational use, usage including reproduction/copying for internal information/documentation purposes at the workplace.

These are areas of usage where the legislator assumes that it is sensible or in fact possible at all that individual authors pursue the usage of their works themselves and collect the relevant rights remuneration.  In the case of mandatory collective management, the collective management organisations administering the various sectors jointly negotiate so-called “common” tariffs with the users’ umbrella organisations. The remuneration thus collected is then distributed in line with the distribution rules to the authors in question. The CMO’s administration and its distribution rules are subject to the supervision by the Federal Institute for Intellectual Property (IPI). The tariffs are subject to the approval by the Federal Arbitration Commission for the Exploitation of Copyright and Related Rights (FAC).