Mr. Andrew Lowe:

The Deputy has prompted me to realise that I did not fully answer Deputy Boyd Barrett's previous question on intellectual property rights. I will make a few comments and then Mr. Byrne might answer.

On Deputy Farrell's question, I will wrap that into the question posed by Deputy Boyd Barrett, who I believe, not to quote him verbatim, described producers as insisting on performers having to assign their rights. While technically, yes, they may insist, in fact what he is describing is how the process works.

Intellectual property has a broad definition, and it includes copyright and performing rights. The people who generate those rights are actors, performers, writers, directors and producers. All of us, including producers, are required to assign our rights to the DAC in the first instance in return for payment to enable the DAC, which is the producers, in turn, to raise the finance to make the show in the first place, whether it is a film or television series. Those rights are then assigned to the financiers who ultimately are the end users, so that might be Netflix, the BBC for UK transmission or HBO in the US. Sometimes it goes to a few different parties while other times it might be a single end user. Those end users are not, by law, allowed to transmit, broadcast or exhibit the film or television series if those rights have not been secured, so it is a practical and technical detail. We all have to give our rights in order for the people who finance our shows to show them and generate the revenues the Deputy described earlier. There should not be any emotion around that. That is just the practical reality of how this works.

What is perhaps slightly complicated and charged is the entitlement to revenues, which is the bigger issue, in a way. The reality is, in the first instance, that however those revenues are generated, so it could be a cinema ticket or someone buying a DVD, downloading from iTunes or watching on Netflix, they all have different ecosystems. With a cinema ticket, for example, the cinema will take a cut out of that, the VAT obviously goes to the Government, and the balance goes to the distributor, which, in turn, deducts its costs of marketing the film, charges its commission and pays the balance to the collection agent that has been appointed by the financiers and producer to be an independent third party to collect all this money. The collection agent will then ask who is entitled to the revenue. The principle is that financiers must have their investment repaid. In the first instance, therefore, the revenues will go towards those financiers until their investment is repaid. It is only at the point where all the financiers have been repaid are there any revenues available for distribution. At that stage, the rule of thumb is half the revenues are retained by the financiers as their profit and the other half is available to be distributed among the various creatives who have been involved, so those are typically the performers, writers, directors and producers. Often, whoever funded the development might have a stake, so there are various other parties. That is broadly how it works.

The distribution of those revenues from a performer's point of view, whether that be an actor, writer or director, is usually determined by one of two things. Either they are party to a collective agreement that allows for the participation in those revenues or they have representation, be it an agent or a lawyer, who will negotiate directly with the producer for his or her client to have a share of future revenues. Sometimes it can be both. Therefore, an actor may have his or her own share of the revenue and participate under the collective agreement. These are mechanisms in place to deal with that.

As a production company, we are well used to structuring all our projects in that way and, wherever we shoot around the world, we sign up to whatever the conditions are locally. We have shot in Canada and US where there are collective agreements. We have shot in the UK where there are collective agreements for actors. Indeed, we have often used PACT-Equity here in Ireland for productions in which we have been involved. We have no problem in principle with that and we think that is a good thing.

As I have said, as a company we have put a lot of effort over the years into helping to create an environment where we can have Irish collective agreements that govern the Irish industry.

We were disappointed when we heard Equity had a change of mind and pulled out of the cinema collective agreement last year. We understand Screen Producers Ireland, SPI, is making efforts to try to encourage Equity back to the table. We would only encourage that. We think it is in everyone's interest that SPI and Equity try to address and resolve any outstanding issues Equity may have. Those sorts of collective agreements are the only way these royalties that are captured can then be distributed to their members.