(2) The development of digital technologies and the internet has transformed the distribution of, and access to, television and radio programmes. Users increasingly expect to have access to television and radio programmes, both live and on-demand, through traditional channels, such as satellite or cable, and also through online services. Broadcasting organisations are therefore increasingly offering, in addition to their own broadcasts of television and radio programmes, online services ancillary to such broadcasts, such as simulcasting and catch-up services. Operators of retransmission services, which aggregate broadcasts of television and radio programmes into packages and provide them to users simultaneously with the initial transmission of those broadcasts, unaltered and unabridged, use various techniques of retransmission, such as cable, satellite, digital terrestrial, and mobile or closed circuit IP-based networks, as well as the open internet.
Furthermore, operators that distribute television and radio programmes to users have different ways of obtaining the programme-carrying signals of broadcasting organisations, including by means of direct_injection.
There is a growing demand, on the part of users, for access to broadcasts of television and radio programmes not only originating in their Member State, but also in other Member States. Such users include members of linguistic minorities in the Union, as well as persons who live in a Member State other than their Member State of origin.
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(3) Broadcasting organisations transmit daily many hours of television and radio programmes. Those programmes incorporate a variety of content, such as audiovisual, musical, literary or graphic works, protected under Union law by copyright or related rights or both.
That results in a complex process of clearing the rights of a multitude of rightholders, and for various categories of works and other protected subject matter.
Often the rights need to be cleared in a short time frame, in particular when preparing programmes such as news or current affairs programmes. In order to make their online services available across borders, broadcasting organisations need to have the required rights to works and other protected subject matter for all the relevant territories, which further increases the complexity of the clearance of such rights.
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(19) Member States should be able to apply the rules on retransmission established in this Directive and in Directive 93/83/EEC to situations where both the initial transmission and the retransmission take place within their territory.
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(20) In order to ensure that there is legal certainty and to maintain a high level of protection for rightholders, it is appropriate to provide that when broadcasting organisations transmit their programme-carrying signals by direct_injection only to signal distributors without directly transmitting their programmes to the public, and the signal distributors send those programme-carrying signals to their users to allow them to watch or listen to the programmes, only one single act of communication to the public is deemed to occur in which both the broadcasting organisations and the signal distributors participate with their respective contributions. The broadcasting organisations and the signal distributors should therefore obtain authorisation from the rightholders for their specific contribution to the single act of communication to the public.
Participation of a broadcasting organisation and a signal distributor in that single act of communication to the public should not give rise to joint liability on the part of the broadcasting organisation and the signal distributor for that act of communication to the public.
Member States should remain free to provide at national level for the arrangements for obtaining authorisation for such a single act of communication to the public, including the relevant payments to be made to the rightholders concerned, taking into account the respective exploitation of the works and other protected subject matter, by the broadcasting organisation and signal distributor, related to the single act of communication to the public.
Signal distributors face, in a similar manner to operators of retransmission services, a significant burden for rights clearance, except as regards rights held by broadcasting organisations. Member States should therefore be allowed to provide that signal distributors benefit from a mechanism of mandatory collective management of rights for their transmissions in the same way and to the same extent as operators of retransmission services for retransmissions covered by Directive 93/83/EEC and this Directive.
Where signal distributors merely provide broadcasting organisations with ‘technical means’, within the meaning of the case-law of the Court of Justice of the European Union, to ensure that the broadcast is received or to improve the reception of that broadcast, the signal distributors should not be considered to be participating in an act of communication to the public.
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