European Visual Artists (EVA) represents the interests of authors’ collective management organisations for the visual arts. 31 societies are gathered under this roof as members or observers. They manage collectively authors’ rights of close to 170 000 creators of works of fine art, illustration, photography, design, architecture and other visual works.
Tailored licenses for individual cases of use are issued within national territories or across borders to all kinds of user categories, such as publishers, cultural heritage institutions comprising museums, archives and libraries, educational establishments, art market professionals, film productions and broadcasters as well as for merchandising products, and for analogue and digital use. Besides, remuneration is collected and distributed for collective use such as reprography, private copying, cable (re-) transmission. In the field of collective rights, such as private copying, reprography and cable (re) transmission they reach out to an estimated 500.000 authors. EVA’s members also manage artists’ resale right and the right of communication/making available to the public, including within the scope of the Copyright in the Digital Single Market directive 2019/790.
EVA’s members are non-profit organisations and are managing authors’ rights as fiduciary or trustee of the artists. Individual artists and artists professional associations have founded their collective management organisation themselves with the aim to set up a well functioning rights management and efficient defence of their own artists’ rights.
The mission of EVA’s members is to facilitate access to works, create legal certainty and ensure that the artists receive an equitable share of any profit generated by others with the exploitation of the works. Authors rights are the artists’ income. EVA’s task is also to improve the European authors rights.
EVA is active since the beginning of the 90ies and was founded formally in 1997 by 9 European collective management societies for visual arts. EVA represents its members towards the institutions of the European Union and informs about their artists’ situation, working conditions, rights, needs and interests. EVA also provides information about the work of the collective management societies in the field of visual authors and their activities to defend author’s rights. Collective management societies play an important role to maintain the Cultural Diversity in Europe. Europe’s artists deserve receiving appropriate moral and financial recognition of the added value they create for the society. EVA is also formal observer of WIPO and cooperates with WIPO in its tasks to protect the authors’ rights.