Question 12446 — press and books

Summary

Mr. Patrick Hetzel questions the Minister of Culture about the status of collection directors within publishing houses. Indeed, after long months of silence, despite numerous requests from the national publishing union, the ministry in charge of social affairs and the ministry of culture made known, at the beginning of June 2018, their decisions on the status of collection directors in book publishing. Devoting the full effects of a unilateral decision by AGESSA, the French administration no longer recognizes collection directors as a component of literary creation as was very well developed in a column in the daily newspaper Le Figaro M. Antoine Gallimard: on the one hand the status of collection director will no longer fall under the social protection of artist-authors and on the other hand this new rule will take effect from January 1, 2019 (declaration to be sent to the administration no later than January 15, 2019). Even if remuneration in copyright remains possible throughout 2018, this rule will affect all current contracts as well as future contracts which generate remuneration paid after January 1, 2019. Consequently, from January 2019, collection directors must be remunerated in salaries or fees, according to the concrete conditions of exercise of their activity. The terms of current or future contracts must take this into account and be modified if necessary. For people who have combined both functions (collection director and author of works published within the collection), two separate contracts must be established. In this hypothesis, only the publishing contract will be able to generate copyright subject to the social contributions for the artists-authors’ regime. This radical change places all publishing houses and their collection directors in a situation of economic and legal insecurity and, in essence, goes against the principles which prevail in the laws and case law. And which were until then applied by Agessa. The compliance deadline imposed on publishers does not take into account the operation of the book sector, namely that income from the exploitation of books is paid the year following the actual sales. Taking these elements into account, the National Publishing Union has requested, without response to date, that sufficient time be granted to bring the contracts of the 900 collection directors listed by Agessa into compliance. His question is twofold: he asks him what the motivations are which justify such treatment, to the extent that this decision seriously weakens the French edition and why a more reasonable period for the entry into force of such a measure is not provided.

Machine translation from French. The official text remains authoritative.

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