Tunisia’s parliament voted 76 to 1, with one abstention, to make telecom and internet companies pay toward funding musicians’ copyright. That happened on the evening of Tuesday 12 May 2026. Six months later, no rate has been set, no collection date exists, and the provision that creates the obligation does not name the body that would normally do the collecting.
The law is Law 2026-8, on the status of the artist and artistic professions, published in Tunisia’s Journal Officiel on 14 May 2026. It runs to a reported 45 articles covering a professional card for artists, standard-form artistic contracts, broadcast quotas for Tunisian creative work and social protection for irregular artistic labour. Inside it, one article does something none of the others do: it reaches into the balance sheets of eight named telecom and internet companies.
What Article 39 does, on the one account that describes it#
Tunisian telecoms trade outlet Tunisie Haut Debit, writing on 13 May 2026, gives the most detailed account of Article 39 that this desk could locate. By its reading, the article subjects telecom network operators and digital broadcasting platforms to levies set as a proportion of their revenue, with the exact terms to be fixed later by decree. It names eight companies as concerned: the three mobile network operators active in Tunisia, Tunisie Telecom, Ooredoo and Orange Tunisie, and five internet service providers, ATI, Gnet, Hexabyte, Bee and Netty.
No percentage is reported. No deadline for the decree is reported. No collection mechanism is named. The outlet describes the money’s destination only as a probability: a share of the revenue will “probablement” (probably) go to a fund supporting national artistic creation. That hedge belongs to the outlet, not to this desk softening a firmer claim it actually found.
What this desk tried, and what did not work#
Before relying on a paraphrase, this desk tried to read Article 39 in the primary legal text. Two Tunisian legal-text portals that would carry it, jort.tn and legislation.tn, both refused the connection outright on repeated attempts. A third, Juridoc.tn, hosts the law but puts it behind a login beyond Article 1. No working link to a PDF of the relevant Journal Officiel issue could be located. That attempt failed, and this desk is saying so rather than presenting Tunisie Haut Debit’s account as if it were the statute itself.
The next check was corroboration: did any other Tunisian outlet covering the same law’s passage describe the same telecom provision. Five were fetched and read in full: Tunisie Numerique, Businessnews.com.tn (twice, once on the vote and once on the law’s provisions), Webdo, Tunisia Business and Kapitalis. None of the five mentions Article 39, a telecom contribution, an internet service provider, or a copyright rate at all. They cover the professional card, the artistic contract, the broadcast quotas and the social-protection provisions instead, and are consistent with each other on those. A sixth account, in L’Economiste Maghrebin, describes a separate, earlier-stage proposal: a fund that could raise roughly 100 million dinars a year from telecom-turnover and storage-media taxes, administered partly as loan guarantees through the Societe Tunisienne de Garantie. That piece does not mention Article 39 either, and nothing read by this desk establishes that it describes the same mechanism. Tunisia already runs a separate, long-established 1.75 per cent telecom-turnover levy that funds a cinema and audiovisual investment vehicle under the Centre National du Cinema et de l’Image. That is a different, existing fund, not this one.
So this record stands on one detailed account of a specific statutory provision, clearly labelled as such. That is a real limitation, and it is stated here rather than smoothed into a confident paraphrase.
The absence that matters most#
Tunisia already has a national collecting society: the Organisme Tunisien des Droits d’Auteur et des Droits Voisins (OTDAV), operating under the Ministry of Culture, licensing the public use of musical and other protected works and collecting and distributing what it bills. If any institution in Tunisia were going to invoice eight telecom and internet companies and pass the proceeds to songwriters and performers, OTDAV is the obvious candidate.
On Tunisie Haut Debit’s own reading of the text, OTDAV is not named in Article 39. No body is named as the collector or distributor of the new contribution. This desk also could not locate a published OTDAV statement, for or against, on Law 2026-8; the society’s own legislation page did not load within this desk’s timeout window, and that attempt was not completed rather than abandoned silently.
A statutory duty to pay, sitting on eight named companies, with no rate, no deadline and no named recipient, is not the same thing as a functioning levy. It is the first of three pieces a working mechanism needs. The other two, the decree that sets the number and the body that cashes the cheque, do not yet exist in anything this desk could reach.
What this means for Tunisian artists, right now#
There is no money to collect yet. Until a decree fixes a rate and a due date, eight telecom and internet companies have nothing specific to calculate, and no songwriter, composer or performer has a figure to claim. A vote is not a payment.
Do not assume OTDAV’s mandate grew automatically. OTDAV already licenses broadcasters, venues and other users of music in Tunisia under the country’s 1994 copyright law. Nothing this desk could verify shows Article 39 folding the new telecom contribution into that existing collection, or standing up a separate fund alongside it. Which of those two outcomes happens, or whether a third structure emerges, is not yet settled on the public record.
Watch the decree, not the vote. This desk has documented the same pattern once already this year, in Nigeria’s 200 million dollar Creative Economy Development Fund: a headline commitment, cited everywhere, followed by a long stretch in which no money moves through a named channel to a named recipient. A 76-1 vote in Tunis in May is a real legislative event. A functioning payment from a telecom operator to a musician is a separate event, and it has not happened yet.
Tunisia’s telecom copyright levy: quick answers#
What does Article 39 of Tunisia’s Law 2026-8 do?#
On the one detailed account this desk could verify, it requires telecom operators and internet service providers to pay a levy proportional to their revenue, with the rate and collection method left to a decree not yet published.
Which companies does Tunisia’s new copyright levy apply to?#
Eight are named in the single trade account this desk could locate: mobile operators Tunisie Telecom, Ooredoo and Orange Tunisie, and internet service providers ATI, Gnet, Hexabyte, Bee and Netty.
Does OTDAV collect Tunisia’s new telecom copyright levy?#
Not according to the text as reported. OTDAV, Tunisia’s national collecting society, is not named in Article 39 as the collector or distributor of the new contribution, and no replacement body is named either.
A published implementing decree, or a statement from OTDAV, the Ministry of Culture or any of the eight named companies, would resolve most of what this desk could not establish. Any of those, if published, will be reflected here and in the deal record. No party named in this piece was asked for comment.
