French court rules that resale right royalty must be only paid by sellers
Latest French ruling causes agitation in the art world Among the areas of copyright harmonized at the EU level there is the so called 'droit de suite' (also known as 'resale right' or 'artist's resale royalty'), a creature at first typically belonging to droit d'auteur , rather than common law copyright [the UK, for instance, has only had it since 2001] , systems. The EU resale right By adopting Directive 2001/84 (Resale Right Directive) EU legislature mandated upon Member States to "provide for the benefit of the author of an original work of art, a resale right, to be defined as an inalienable right, which cannot be waived, even in advance, to receive a royalty based on the sale price obtained for any resale of the work, subsequent to the first transfer of the work by the author." [Article 1(1)] . In a nutshell, the resale right, as explained in the preamble to the directive: is meant to enable authors/artists to r...