The SGAE celebrates 125 years of history, a long story, and the last few years have been turbulent, in which there have been a mixture of scandals, conflicts over new forms of cultural diffusion and management problems that have put the historic entity in charge of collecting copyrights from creators since 1899. Overcome these problems, which began during the presidency of Teddy Bautista (acquitted in 2021 of all the charges he was accused of: misappropriation, disloyal administration, falsification of document and illegal association), its current president, Antonio Onetti, captains a ship with 130,000 members that last year brought in 350 million euros, and which has equaled the numbers of 2007. Now it is preparing to to the events celebrating the anniversary, which start on Monday with a concert at the Palau de la Música in Barcelona, ??where the Vallès Symphony Orchestra will perform pieces by the organization’s founders.
How do you live this birthday?
Few institutions have a 125th anniversary, and we celebrate that the institution has regained normality, a transparent and stable operation.
After a few turbulent years…
The truth is that yes, in fact, the 120th anniversary was not celebrated, we were at a very critical moment with a notice of license withdrawal from the Ministry of Culture, Cisac [International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers] had us expelled as full members and we were on the brink of extinction. But this was fixed, when I came in as president in April 2020, we regained our affiliation with Cisac, and the ministry lifted the awareness.
Does the SGAE collect what it would touch?
In 2022, and this situation is repeating itself in 2023, we are above 340 million euros. This figure includes some modalities such as streaming, in which a lot of progress can be made, since the fees imposed by these platforms are quite low for copyright.
Do they all act at once?
Of course, through Gesac [European management company] and Cisac itself we are trying to get the platforms to recognize the value that the works of our authors really have, and for the different legislations to do so as well. There are many countries where royalties are not yet collected, or where only certain modalities are collected. In a market as large as the United States, the authors of Spanish films practically do not collect royalties.
Artificial intelligence is another big challenge.
Artificial intelligence is not born out of nothing, to create works it must be nourished by pre-existing works that are creations of human beings. At the same time, the artificial intelligence is a tool for the other authors, so it is necessary to set some limits, to establish how the work of the creators is paid when the artificial intelligence uses them as a basis, even if only for training .
Has society’s perception of copyright changed?
A lot has changed, but it is necessary to educate about the importance of copyright, since it allows creators to have a decent life with the effort of their work, and this allows them to work independently and generate a critical awareness. Copyright is still part of human rights, but some things are still difficult to understand.
These debates gave the organization a very bad reputation when it was chaired by Teddy Bautista.
At that time, Teddy Bautista became the number one public enemy of Spanish society, which is absurd. A gentleman who is a musician becomes public enemy number one, as if there were no other candidates, but it was so because there was a lot of manipulation about it, there were a lot of entities that through piracy made a lot of profits and it suited them that no one should have any prejudice to download movies or songs for free, because their business was to facilitate it. Now there is more access to all those creations thanks to the platforms, and the piracy rates have dropped in a special way.
Among those benefiting from piracy, do you include the big operators like Telefónica, Orange or Vodafone?
Everyone involved in the business of transmitting cultural works at that time benefited from being excluded from that pie that corresponded to copyright, exactly the same as if you don’t pay VAT or electricity.
How is the figure of Teddy Bautista in the history of the SGAE?
He has been its highest representative for 25 years, in which he did a very important task to put this society at the highest levels. I have a lot of respect for him, which does not mean that there are those who think that in the last stage there were management errors, errors that can be debatable but that can be committed by anyone who manages. This is not a crime, it is not for them to attack him like they did with Bautista. I am very glad that he was acquitted and I regret that it took ten years to do so.
You returned stability to the SGAE and handed over management to technicians.
I am the first president who has not been an executive president, I always say that if they give me a company like Coca-Cola I will destroy it in 15 days. I’m an author, I represent authors and society and I can do a lot of PR stuff. But technical management must fall to technical specialists from each of the facets and the departments that make it up. The authors must set the objectives and supervise, but not interfere in the work of the technicians.
