E sccr/21/2 Original: English date: August , 2010 Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights Twenty First Session Geneva, November to 12, 2010

Authors and Performers

32 Authors and performers obtain income from licenses and sales of rights based on their creative works and performances. Copyright traditions vary around the world, but distinctions are generally made between ‘authors’ and others, including performers.

33 An ‘author’, in this sense, refers to the individual or individuals who originate expressions. Copyright is seen to vest initially in this source, meaning economic rights and, in some cases, moral rights as well. Moral rights link the creator and the creation, and are therefore said to bear on the authenticity of the product. Authorship covers literary authors, journalists, writers, photographers, film and TV directors, satirists, graphic designers, lyricists, composers, and others. In the European tradition, they are automatically vested with economic and moral copyright, essentially meaning that they stand as independent creative producers selling their creative work to an employer or other purchaser who needs to negotiate over additional exploitation of the products not envisioned in the original terms of employment or exchange. In the Anglo-American tradition, authors may be independent creators or employees. Employment status is understood to signify a default position whereby employees transfer all their rights to the creative work as part of the employment agreement, and the work belongs to the employer. This is known as the “work for hire” system and is a tradition not universally embraced worldwide.

34 Performance is generally understood as distinct from authorship, in that it represents a subsidiary expression—as in, for example, a singer performing a song written by someone else on a television entertainment program. The rights of performers can be seen as ‘neighboring rights’ to authors’ rights, with certain protection entitlements, and are of a different nature. Performers are thus often attributed such ‘neighboring rights’, which enable them to authorize both live performances and recorded ones.

35 Authors and performers share a strong common interest in obtaining a fair share of economic benefits from any use, reuse, or adaptation of their creations or performances. In addition, some authors and most performers are heavy users of copyrighted works¹² and generally support ease of access to works of other creators for their own use, reuse, and adaptation. Consequently many creators support Creative Commons’ licensing possibilities, which provide explicit flexibility in the form of diverse reuse categories and combinations for content.

36 It should be noted that the interests of highly successful authors and performers sometimes differ significantly from those who are less successful. These differences are sometimes manifest in the sources of their incomes, in differing abilities to protect their incomes contractually, and in costs and prices paid for collective rights management services.

37 Regarding protection of signals, this category of stakeholders generally supports it inasmuch as it limits unauthorized exploitation of their work. However, in instances where their motivation as authors or performers is the maximum unconditional dissemination of their work, authors and performers are concerned that any potential user of their broadcast work could possibly be construed, under the treaty, to be required to obtain a separate consent of the broadcasters whose signals carry their content, even when creators have waived copyrights to their product. Because broadcasters’ rights in their signals do not extend to rights in the content, however, the user who wishes to use the content has the option of dealing directly with the author/performer and seeking permission for the use of their content, without involving the use of the version embedded in specific broadcast signals.

38 Authors and performers as stakeholders are directly represented by a variety of organizations worldwide, including professional associations of authors, journalists, composers, actors, and musicians.