The EU Commission has finally released its long-anticipated study on contractual practices affecting the transfer of copyright and related rights in the creative sectors—including audiovisual, music, visual arts, video games, and literary works. The study examines how authors, performers, and producers negotiate and assign their rights to contractual counterparts who subsequently exploit these works.
FIA played a key role in the process, providing extensive contractual evidence to document a harsh reality: buyout contracts remain the dominant model in the audiovisual sector, leaving performers without fair or proportionate remuneration. Despite the promises of the 2019 Copyright in the Digital Single Market (CDSM) Directive—especially Article 18, which mandates “appropriate and proportionate remuneration”—little has changed. The Directive’s weak language and lack of enforceable obligations have allowed most Member States to ignore its core principles.
Although the study is extensive, complex, and at times lacks structural coherence, it includes repeated and significant findings that point to one core conclusion: the CDSM Directive has failed to curb the dominance of buyout practices in the audiovisual sector. These contracts—typically based on lump-sum payments that deny performers’ access to future revenue—are still the industry standard. In fact, 64% of audiovisual performers report being paid through lump sums – mostly in the form of buyout contracts. Among them, 41% see no change since the directive’s adoption, and 25% report an increase in such contracts.
This shows that the Directive has had no meaningful impact on contract norms—especially for performers negotiating without union or collective representation. Buyouts are routinely used to sidestep proportional remuneration. Lump sums may not always be buyouts, but buyouts always rely on lump sums, and when these become the default, the Directive’s intention is fundamentally undermined.
By their nature, buyout contracts are non-proportional: they are paid up front, before the market performance of the work is known, severing any link between a performer’s remuneration and the actual economic value of their contribution. Moreover, the practice of bundling performance fees and rights transfer payments into a single amount conceals the appraisal of the rights themselves, further compromising transparency and fairness.
Equally concerning is the failure to implement Article 19 of the Directive, which mandates transparency. In the audiovisual sector, performers rarely receive data about how their work is used or monetized—particularly those paid via lump sums, despite the fact that Article 19 applies regardless of payment structure. The study confirms that only a few Member States have introduced effective transparency measures. There are no penalties for non-compliance, and the only recourse—voluntary alternative dispute resolution (ADR)—is rarely used due to its ineffectiveness and the risk of retaliation.
The result is a deeply imbalanced system where audiovisual performers are routinely deprived of fair pay and basic information rights. The persistence of buyouts, the erosion of transparency, and the failure of enforcement mechanisms all run counter to the Directive’s stated aims.
FIA therefore calls for urgent EU-level intervention to address these structural failures, including: defining and restricting the use of lump-sum remuneration, ensuring it remains the exception—not the rule; singling out buyouts from other forms of lump-sum remuneration and declaring them incompatible with the spirit of the Directive; mandating enforceable transparency obligations, with meaningful penalties for non-compliance; strengthening collective bargaining to protect performers from having to negotiate individually in imbalanced power dynamics; and establishing effective dispute resolution mechanisms, to address breaches of transparency, with safeguards against blacklisting and retaliation.
Without bold policy action, the CDSM Directive risks becoming a dead letter for the performers it intended to protect.
Performers deserve fair pay, transparency, and a real say in how their work is used. The time to act is now.
