Hotel owners should not be required to pay royalties to broadcasting organisations simply because they make television sets available in the guest bedrooms, Advocate General Maciej Szpunar concluded before the Court of Justice of the EU on Tuesday 25 October.
In this case (C-641/15), the aim was essentially to determine the scope of the notion of "place accessible to the public against payment of an entrance fee", which is central to the directive on rental and lending rights and certain rights related to copyright in the field of intellectual property (2006/115/EC). Is a hotel bedroom a place within the meaning of the directive? If so, can the fact that the client pays to access it and may watch television there be considered the payment of an entrance fee and thereby justify levying a charge on hoteliers?
In the view of the Verwertungsgesellschaft Rundfunk, an Austrian company for the collective management of copyright which represents a number of national and foreign broadcasting organisations and which brought the original case, the answer is very clearly in the affirmative. However, the Advocate General reached the opposite conclusion: hotel owners are not obliged to pay royalties to broadcasting organisations.
He justifies this reasoning very simply: a hotel guest pays for his or her bedroom not in order to be able to watch television programmes there, but in order to stay there overnight. On that basis, it must be considered that the possibility of watching television in a hotel bedroom is merely an additional service that the client expects in very much the same way as running water, a minibar and an internet connection. (Original version in French by Jan Kordys)