Abstract

The draft amendment to the Act on Copyright and Related Rights provides for strengthening the right to remuneration to artists performing musical and verbal-musical works for making their artistic performances available online. The right to this remuneration has been designed in the draft symmetrically to the right to remuneration for works and artistic performances used in audiovisual works. Namely, it has been recognized as inalienable, unrelinquishable and inexecutable, as well as mandatorily claimable on behalf of all performers by an authorized collective management organization. Such an approach to the performers’ right to remuneration does not limit the right to dispose the rights in artistic performance by their acquirer. It is aimed to provide an artist with fair and proportionate remuneration for making artistic performances available online, in proportion to the proceeds from their use and the nature and scope of this use.
A separate issue is the lack of symmetry between the drafted recognition of remuneration for artistic performances and the recognition in the Act of the right to remuneration due to the authors. Even if the current contractual practice respects the authors’ rights to remuneration for the online use of their verbal, musical and verbal-musical works at a satisfactory level, a symmetrical statutory guarantee of this right also to performers would provide them with this right thus ensuring some certainty and stability.