Mr. Gerry O'Brien:

There are two things. First, you have to be very protective of where you invest the money. It is quite understandable that you need reputable players, but when someone like a young filmmaker or a young writer comes along and has an idea, how do you invest in that idea and make sure that the person holds onto those rights or, if a new company is emerging, how do you make sure he or she has the opportunity to avoid having to give his or her rights away in order to access the funding available through the established companies? We have a system that has been honed over, say, the past 25 years, and I am around long enough to have seen and to describe how the change has occurred. There are about five or six major players and they are safe hands, as far as you are concerned, and you ensure that people have to give their rights to those players, but the question is how those rights are assigned. If those players have all the power, they have the ability to make sure that the assignment of rights is not necessarily fair. We have that problem and that imbalance, which was part of what the European copyright directive deliberately set out to change. That directive was designed to recognise that individual performers and individual writers, when going to major production houses, do not have the leverage to create a fair environment for themselves.