Have you recently received this letter in the mail?
After incorporation, every entrepreneur receives a letter from Reprobel requesting payment of an annual contribution. But what exactly is Reprobel, and more importantly, are you obliged to pay it?
What is Reprobel? Why should I pay for it?
Use of copyrighted works
A company has to comply with a lot of obligations, including copyright. Without giving it much thought, your company too probably regularly uses copyrighted works.
Think, for example, of an interesting article you share with a colleague, or a legal text you print out to put in front of you during your work. Authors and publishers of those works lose revenue because of that further distribution of their protected works.
A company often has no insight into how its employees use or distribute copyrighted works. It is also often difficult to find out who the original author of a work is, and what licence terms, if any, are attached to the work.
Therefore, Reprobel was created: a Belgian management company that collects and distributes remunerations for authors of literary and visual arts to compensate for the photocopies made of their published works on paper and for public lending rights.
Use of copyrighted works
Every year, in the first quarter, you will receive a request from Reprobel, by e-mail or by post, to file a declaration, with a deadline for the declaration (30 April). In this communication you will find your personal login details for the declaration portal.
With those login details, you can then submit your declaration via the online portal. You first check your details, and then choose the declaration option that most closely matches your actual use of copyrighted works.
Your Reprobel remuneration is afterwards fully distributed among the rights holders. This way, authors and publishers receive a fair remuneration for the use of their works.
The modern Reprobel declaration: izili by reprobel
The Reprobel model was initially created in the context of paper copies of works. A company can choose to pay a fixed page fee per copy of €0.0554, or a fixed annual fee per FTE employee: €8, €12 or €20.
That licence, which only covers the copyrights of paper copies, has since become obsolete: the number of copies we print today has fallen dramatically compared to 10 years ago. A digital reproduction of a protected work is now much more common.
Thanks to izili by reprobel (read: 'easy licence'), you can now choose a combined licence, which applies to both paper copies and digital works. Depending on your sector and the number of relevant employees employed, you will owe an annual fee of €40 to €98.
Which companies need to register with Reprobel
In principle, every company is obliged to file a Reprobel declaration. Nevertheless, companies in the lowest rate category (such as retail and hospitality), with less than 5 staff, are not notified.
Reprobel itself takes care of the initial communication with your login data. In principle, if you do not receive these, you should not register.
When should you file the return?
You will receive the first communication from Reprobel in the first quarter of the calendar year. The deadline for submitting the declaration is 30 April.
How to pay a remuneration to Reprobel
During the declaration process in the online portal, you can easily pay for your licence digitally. Do you opt for the combined licence? Then you always pay a fee per relevant employee. The amount of the fee depends on the sector in which you operate and how many relevant employees you employ.
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