Copyright is an intellectual property right, like trademark law or patent law. Thus, for the rights holder, it is a temporary monopoly of exploitation; for the user, a temporary right of prohibition. Copyright protects any creation of the human mind that is cast in a concrete form and bears the personal stamp of the author. In other words, any creation that is the result of free creative or intellectual choices made by the author, and which is not banal. Any human creation that meets the copyright protection requirements can therefore be copyrighted. This applies not only to artistic works such as literature, comics, an art photograph, a painting or a sculpture but also, e.g., to informative works such as professional literature, educational or scientific works, press articles and cartoons. Copyright protection is form-free, and it is valid until seventy years after the death of the longest living author.

All forms of copyright fees are private law renumerations. They are therefore never a tax or duty. They ensure that the rights holders (in the case of Reprobel usually the authors and the publishers) receive a fair remuneration for the reuse of their copyright-protected works, also in today’s digital world. What Reprobel collects goes – after deduction of its limited operating costs – entirely to the rights holders, and thus not to the state.

Reprobel can arrange many copyrights centrally for your organisation, but by no means all of them. For the private and public sector, Reprobel can only arrange the copyrights relating to paper reproductions and the most common forms of digital reuse of copyright-protected texts and still images for you, except for digital use if the rights holders themselves or through their management company already offer a separate licence. (E.g. the licences for sheet music from Semu or for structural use of press articles via License2publish or Copiepresse , or the individual licences for databases, photo databases and e-books). However, Reprobel does not offer licences for music used by or in your company or institution – for that you can go to www.unisono.be. Copyrights on audiovisual works must also be arranged separately, usually via the producer. For the legal remunerations that Reprobel collects in the sectors of recognised education or scientific research and of public lending, Reprobel does represent the rights holders of sound and audiovisual works.

No. Reprobel has signed over 40 international representation agreements with foreign partner organizations.

These agreements govern not only the distribution of statutory remunerations but also allow Reprobel to include a virtually global repertoire of copyrighted texts and still images in its combined license bizili by Reprobel for reuse within Belgium.

Under the legal remuneration scheme for reprography, you only make compulsory declarations to Reprobel for your photocopies of copyright-protected texts and still images. You pay a proportional page fee for each photocopy of protected work during the reference year, although smaller companies can also pay standardised. However, this does not give you any digital licence coverage through Reprobel.

If, at the same time, you also want to regulate copyrights in connection with the most common forms of digital reuse of protected texts and images, you can arrange this easily and centrally via bizili by Reprobel. For all acts of use within the broad licence limits and for both Belgian and a worldwide repertoire of foreign source works. More information on the difference between reprography remuneration and the combined bizili by Reprobel licence can be found here.

Reprobel is the central copyright organization for Belgian authors and publishers. It is primarily monitored by its 15 member management societies for authors and/or publishers. These societies are owned by the rights holders themselves.
Reprobel is also audited by its external auditor RSM and monitored by the Control Service for Management Societies at the FPS Economy.