Copyright and Related Rights (Amendment) Bill 2025: Committee Stage Seanad Éireann — 2026-02-24 ============================================================ Frances Black (IND), Industrial and Commercial Panel I have submitted this amendment because I am concerned about how performers can meaningfully secure their right to equitable remuneration under the Bill. Artists and musicians are some of the most isolated and vulnerable workers. Without effective practices available to them that are supported on a statutory footing, I am worried that artists and musicians will be left without workable protections so that they can fairly receive royalties for their work. On Second Stage, the Minister stated that the Bill restores full compliance with EU and international law. However, compliance is not just about stating a right. EU law requires rights to be effective in practice and, unfortunately, the Bill as drafted does not achieve that. In fact, it diminishes performer protections because it requires prohibitively costly individual litigation to make the right to equitable remuneration real. The Minister spoke about a new process for the agreement of division between producers and performers. If an agreement fails, the State must clearly lay out the process to ensure sharing happens. That is what is really important. The Bill tells performers they have a right, but it gives them no realistic means of obtaining that right unless they litigate individually. This avenue will be unavailable to the vast majority of performers due to the associated costs. The Minister also stated that default splits of 50:50 will make disputes unlikely and the court will only be used in exceptional circumstances. However, a default split will not remove disputes if the system allows for unilateral deductions and provides no reliable method for calculating individual performer allocations. In this regard, I would like to voice my support for amendment No. 2 in the names of Senators McDowell and Conway, to substitute the term "reasonable collection costs" for "justifiable and documented costs". To protect the equitable remuneration rights of the performer, it is critically important that there is transparency in royalty collection. I will give the Minister of State an example. Recorded Artists Actors Performers, RAAP, have told me that performance royalties by PPI, an organisation representing record labels, distributed €3 million to performers in 2024 but RAAP, which represents all of the artists, believes that sum should have been €6 million. That is worrying. Money should have gone to performers, but it has not. There is no real transparency. That is a real concern. The Bill ignores that issue. Can the Minister of State commit to reviewing existing legislation to address the gaping lacuna? I have worked with many artists who, without doubt, have put Ireland on the map when it comes to music internationally. They are not getting the proper rights they deserve. Amendment No. 5 would ensure the performer's right to equitable remuneration under section 208 is exercised by default through a collective management organisation representing performers, registered as a licensing body for performers with property rights under section 286. It provides an explicit safeguard that a performer may, at any time, opt out of CMO representation easily and effectively. Similarly, regarding litigation in situations where there is no agreement on equitable remuneration in the collection of royalties, individual performers and musicians cannot realistically enforce or administer equitable remuneration in a single payment in every single instance of the use of his or her performance. This is unworkable in practice. Default collective management is a practical mechanism that makes the right effective. It moves performers from an optional and fragmented enforcement model to a model that works at a national scale and reduces the risk that market power or complexity leaves individual performers unable to benefit from the right. Importantly, there is also an opt-out clause which ensures the system remains performer-led and rights-based, rather than locking performers into a structure they do not want. Performers will still retain autonomy under this amendment. In addition, my amendment places a clear statutory responsibility on an appropriate performer licensing body, namely, a CMO, for calculating how the performer share of equitable remuneration is divided between individual performers. The CMO would operate a scheme that ensured the management of equitable remuneration and provide a statutory mechanism that designated who calculated the allocation. It would prevent stalemate by giving the controller a narrowly defined tie-break role where multiple bodies were eligible to calculate the allocation and could not agree. This is the practical distribution point of royalties. A right to a share is entirely meaningless unless there are workable mechanisms to allocate that share to real people who deserve it. At present and in practice, this allocation function has been assumed, unilaterally, by the producer side, PPI, and is carried out through the UK producer-controlled organisation, PPL. The difficulty is that the calculation is being carried out at additional expense without sufficient Irish performer data and matching capability, with the result that many performers are under-identified, underpaid or not paid at all. My amendment would make allocation auditable because the calculation would be carried out by a recognised performing licensing body under an appropriate scheme. This would be efficient because responsibility would be clearly assigned and harder to obstruct, given that any delays through institutional disagreement would be resolved by a neutral controller decision. This would remove ambiguity over who performed the allocation and prevent deadlock where multiple bodies could claim the task of collecting and ensuring the performers' share was allocated using an identified scheme-based process rather than being shaped by a bargaining power. If we are serious about creating a meaningful right for performers to their fair share of royalty payments, then we must provide a workable mechanism to achieve that. I hope the Minister of State will accept this amendment. It is very important. I would have liked to have met the Minister to discuss it but, unfortunately, he was not available. --- 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