Copyright and Related Rights (Amendment) Bill 2025: Committee Stage Seanad Éireann — 2026-02-24 ============================================================ Michael McDowell (IND), National University of Ireland The point about all of this is that the actual allocation of equitable remuneration between the owner of the sound recording copyright and the artist performance copyright is something which needs to be solidly grounded in clearly understood principles. At this stage, it should be stated that there is very considerable dissatisfaction on the part of recording artists that they are not getting their fair share out of the equitable remuneration collected by licensing bodies for the use of sound recordings. In effect, the recording artists are driven towards a 25% share rather than a 50% share. Of course, it is the case that the sound recording interest and its copyright must be protected and that the recording artist must have their interest protected fairly as well. There is considerable dissatisfaction on the part of recording artists that EU Directive 2006/115/EC on rental and lending rights has not been properly transposed into Irish law. When Ireland transposed the directive, it did not provide for a shared right. Under section 38 of the principal Act, prior to the introduction of this Bill, the producers of sound recordings were granted a monopoly over the collection of the single payment. Section 208 of that Act gave performers only a subsidiary right to claim an unspecified payment from the producers. The collection agency for sound recording owners, Phonographic Performance Ireland, PPI, entered into an agreement in 2003 for a lump sump to be paid to the representative body of the recording artists, based on the number of played tracks in any given year. In accordance with its database of performer information and its distribution rules, the recording artists' organisation then distributed the payment among the performers of the played tracks. This agreement operated consensually until the year 2014, when PPI decided to change the methodology for calculating the performers' share. When the recoding artists' organisation objected, PPI terminated the agreement. Over the period since then, PPI, with the assistance of Phonographic Performance Limited, PPL, which is a similar organisation in the United Kingdom and has among its participants Universal Music Group, Warner Music and Sony Music, has taken over all aspects of the management of the performer share of the single payment, rendering the recording artists' organisation redundant in relation to its key function. PPI has also incrementally adopted new "rules", as it put it, affecting the performance shares and driving down payments to performers to less than 25% of the total amount collected. The recording artists' organisation has been in litigation with PPI since July 2016 at enormous expense to the performers and under the threat it may ultimately not be able to survive. PPI and PPL members are very wealthy organisations whereas the performing artists are, by definition, much more vulnerable and much less organised. In the course of the litigation I have just referred to, the High Court referred several questions to the Court of Justice of the European Union, ECJ. On 8 September 2020, the court ruled that Ireland had failed to transpose the directive by confining the right to remuneration to a limited set of performers. That enabled PPI to allocate royalties to what were termed "non-qualifying performers" and to divert those royalties to producers. In the five years that followed that, between 2020 and now, the State has failed to implement the ruling of the court. PPI has continued to withhold the sums due to those performers whom it disqualified on the basis of the discredited section of the principle Act. Now, the Government appears to be in a great hurry to put an end to this long and embarrassing delay in implementing the ruling of the ECJ before the State takes up the Presidency of the European Union in July. Patently, that is the State's only interest. Instead of clarifying the right is a shared right or even modifying the monopoly granted to the producers with conditions that strike a fair balance between performers and producers, the Bill, in its present form, will seriously damage performers' interests. It is in that context this amendment has been formulated. The purpose of this new subparagraph (3A) is to make it clear what the nature of equitable remuneration is - a right to receive equitable remuneration to be shared between the owner of the sound recording and performers whose performances are incorporated in the sound recording. --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2026-02-24/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:41+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-02-24