PLR programmes vary from country to country. Some, like Germany and the Netherlands, have linked PLR to
copyright legislation and have made libraries liable to pay authors for every
book in their collection. Other countries do not connect PLR to copyright. In Denmark, the current programme is considered a type of governmental support of the arts, not reimbursement of potential lost sales. Types of works supported are books, music, and visual artworks, created and published in Denmark, and available in public and school libraries. In the UK, authors
Brigid Brophy and
Maureen Duffy spearheaded a campaign to achieve a public lending right, following on from
John Brophy's original notion in the 1950s of 'The Brophy Penny'. The UK PLR scheme was established with the
Public Lending Right Act 1979 which was further expanded in 1982. It was incorporated into the
British Library in 2013. The scheme was administered from 1991 to 2014 by Registrar
James Parker.
Payments How amounts of payment are determined also varies from country to country. For example, in the UK, pay is based on how many times a book has been taken out of a library, while in Canada, the system of payment is based on whether a library owns a book or not. In Canada, annual payment is based on the following equation: :, where the number of libraries is counted from a national sample (number of copies in each library is irrelevant); share is the percentage contribution to the work (e.g. for books with co-authors, illustrators, translators, or narrators); and the time adjustment is 100% for the first 5 years, decreasing to 50% after 16 years, and is 0% after 25 years. The formula is applied to each title registered by the contributor. , there is a maximum of C$4,500 that any one person can receive in a year.
Eligibility criteria Different countries also have differing eligibility criteria. In most nations only published works are accepted, government publications are rarely counted, nor are
bibliographies or
dictionaries. Some PLR services are mandated solely to fund literary works of
fiction, and some such as
Norway, have a sliding scale paying far less to
non-fiction works. Many nations also exclude scholarly and academic texts. ==EU directive==