Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance)
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Then there are the actors and performers. Their creative work is one of factors that is valuable in films from a commercial and financial point of view. It is fair to say that the way films potentially make any money is through the royalties or flow from the distribution and the performance of those films or television series, or their repeated downloading on Netflix or whatever. It is not at the time the DAC is set up for the production that money is made. The money is made on the basis of these being shown repeatedly.

While the DAC is set up, the producer companies are insisting that the actors and performers assign their rights to the intellectual property to the DAC and that their rights to future royalties or residuals are bought out from them in a contract that is significantly inferior in this regard to the pact equity agreement that operates in the UK. Indeed, the inequality in this regard is even more stark when one finds that some people are put on the pact equity agreement but others are not, or that if Element Pictures or any other company is operating in the UK, for example, it has to honour the pact equity agreement and the performers get the benefits of a better deal in respect of their intellectual property and the residuals that would flow to it, but many of them, when they work in Ireland, face an insistence on these grossly inferior buy-out contracts and sign away their rights. Why would we do that to our performers and, indeed, where do those rights then go?

While, as the producer companies insist, the employment relationship between film producers and crew does not survive the DAC, to use the parlance, they also seem to have it both ways because the benefit of the intellectual property rights survives the DAC. It goes somewhere. Where does it go when the DAC is wound up? For example, why, when the DAC is wound up, do the intellectual property rights not go back to the performers? Where do they go? Do they go to the producer company? Do they go to an international company? Did the people who signed them over to the DAC agree to sign them to an international company which they are required to do? Why, indeed, are they being asked to sign these buy-out contracts when the copyright directive insists that buy-out contracts should be the exception and not the rule? In Ireland, they seem to be the rule and not the exception.