Mr. James Hickey:

The Deputy is right about the structure of section 481. The tax credit is paid to the producer company, which is an ongoing company. Revenue places great importance on this, because as far as it is concerned, it wants to deal with people it knows and who it is satisfied will stay around for the purposes of continuing compliance with their obligations under section 481. An equally important matter for both Revenue and business as a whole is the separate special purpose vehicle which is established for each project. The establishment of special purpose vehicles for each project is a practice which dates to long before section 481 was established. It was always the case, and still is the case in most other jurisdictions, that for each different project, the financiers and other people involved in the production of a feature film or television drama series want a separate vehicle for each project, because that is the kind of transparency and accountability that the financiers want. The Revenue Commissioners see the value of that transparency and accountability from having a single company producing the project, so that all the eligible expenditure goes through that production and is seen to be properly spent. Revenue is happy to look at dealing with eligible expenditure.

I will come back to the separate question about rights ownership. This depends on the different types of projects which people are undertaking. In the case of indigenous projects which are produced by indigenous producers, the copyright and distribution rights of the project vest in the producer company. I will clarify that it is important that the producer company owns all the rights from all the contributors to the project. That includes all the actors, the director, the writer, the set designer and the costume designer. Everybody must assign all their rights to the producer company because if it does not own all the rights, the producer company cannot distribute the film. If the broadcaster, distributor or cinema in Paris is told that one of the people involved in the production has not assigned his or her rights to the project, the cinema owner in Paris will not want to screen the film because the person who owns those rights could come and stop the screening of that film. The structure of the industry involves all rights from all contributors to the production having to vest in the production company.