Western intellectual property frameworks have at least one feature in common: performers are less protected than authors. This situation knows many justifications, although all but one have been dismissed by the literature: performers are simply less creative than authors. As a result, the legal protection covering their work has been proportionally reduced compared to that of their authorial peers. This thesis investigates this phenomenon that it calls the 'author-performer divide'. It uncovers the culturally-rooted principles and legal reasoning that policy-makers and judges of Australia, France, the United Kingdom and the United States have developed to create in the legal narrative a hierarchy between authors and performers. It reveals that those intellectual property systems, though continuously reformed, still contain outdated conceptions of creativity based on the belief in ex nihilo creation and over-intellectualised representations of the creative process. Those two precepts combined have led legal discourse to portray performers as their authors' puppets, thus underserving of authorship themselves. This thesis reviews arguments raised against improving the performers' regime to challenge the preconception of performers as uncreative agents and questions the divide it supports. To this end, it seeks to update the representations of creativity currently conveyed in the law by drawing on the findings of other academic disciplines such as creativity research, performance theories as well as music, theatre and dance studies. This comparative inter-disciplinary study aims to move current legal debates on performers' rights away from the recurring themes and repeated arguments in the scholarship such as issues of fixation or of competing claims, all of which have made conversations stagnate. By including disciplines beyond the law, this analysis seeks to advance the legal literature on the question of performers' intellectual property protection and shift thinking about performative forms of creativity.

The natural desire to express the human experience through song, dance, speech and movement have characterised culture and society throughout history. From frantic dances around fires, to comedies and dramas at the ancient theatres, to sold out arena concerts, all driven by the same fundamental spirit of creation and expression. The unification of intellectual creation and physical action that constitutes a performance were for a long time only a transient activity, but that all changed with the introduction of recording technology. To protect the economic and moral interests of performers, a new form of intellectual property right, known as performers right, was introduced. This new form of IP-right was based on a similar rationale as the one for copyright protection of artistic and literary works, and it allowed performing artists to exercise a certain degree of control over fixations of their work. The modern development of image manipulation has come to challenge the integrity of performers rights however. Deepfakes is a form of AI-assisted technology that has made the synthetic manipulation of images, sound and video possible in ways previously unseen, in terms of quality, quantity and accessibility. The manipulation of videos by changing faces or voices of individuals raises a number of questions in a variety of legal areas. In order to bring clarity to the relation between deepfakes and performers rights, the condition under which a deepfake can constitute an infringement, and a granter, of performers rights under EU law, was investigated in this thesis. By primarily relying on a legal dogmatic method to interpret and systematise the existing EU legislation, case law and international treaties in the field of intellectual property, the synthetic manipulations of recorded performances were studied in relation to the applicable law. It was concluded that deepfakes may infringe on the rights of performers if the manipulated content constituted a reproduction of a fixation of a performance. Furthermore, it was also established that a deepfake in itself can not constitute a source of performers rights, due to its synthetic nature

Darbo tema – atlikėjų teisių kolektyvinis administravimas. Dabartis ir perspektyva. Atlikėjų teisių apsauga yra palyginti naujas reiškinys. Atlikėjų teisių atsiradimas siejamas su XX a. pradžioje atsiradusiomis naujomis technologijomis, leidusiomis gyvus atlikimus pakeisti atlikimo įrašais. Atlikėjai siekė kontroliuoti savo atlikimus ir reikalavo teisių šiems atlikimams apsaugoti. Atlikėjų teisės yra fundamentalios. Jomis ne tik užtikrinama atlikėjų turtinių interesų apsaugą, šios teisės taip pat skatina ir palaiko kūrybingumą bei bendrą visos visuomenės kultūros raidą. Nemažai nacionalinių ir tarptautinių teisės aktų garantuoja atlikėjams jų teises. Svarbiausi iš jų: 1961 m. Romos konvencija, 1996 m. PINO Atlikimų ir fonogramų sutartis bei ES direktyvos. Atlikėjų teisių kolektyvinio administravimo organizacijos – tai jų narių (teisių turėtojų) įsteigtos, dažniausiai pelno nesiekiančios organizacijos. Pagrindinis šių organizacijų tikslas yra surinkti ir paskirstyti teisių turėtojams priklausanti atlyginimą už įvairių jų turtinių teisių panaudojimą. Darbo tikslas – atsižvelgiant į istorines raidos aplinkybes, išsamiai išanalizuoti dabartinį atlikėjų teisių kolektyvinio administravimo reglamentavimą tiek tarptautiniu, tiek regioniniu lygiu. Remiantis analize atsakoma į klausimą ar atlikėjų teisių reglamentavimas bei šių teisių kolektyvinis administravimas šiandieninėje situacijoje yra pakankamas atlikėjų turtiniams interesams apsaugoti. Siekiant tikslo darbe analizuojamas... [toliau žr. visą tekstą] / The topic of this paper is Collective Management of Performers' Rights. Nowadays and Future Perspective. The issue of the performers' neighbouring rights is relatively new. It emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century, particularly as a result of technical developments when recordings began to be substitute for live performances. Performers have sought to keep control of their performances by claiming rights to protect them. These rights are fundamental: they secure not only an ingome for performers but also foster the maintenance and the development of creation and culture in the interest of society as a whole. Many national laws and certain international normative texts (Rome Convention of 1961, WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty of 1996 and European Directives) Performers collecting societies are associations of rightholders. They are set up to collect and distribute royalties for rightsholders on a collective basis. Collective management societies of performers are generally non profit organisations based on collective agreements in certain cases. The goal of this paper is a thorough analysis of current regulation of performers rights' collective administration in both international and regional levels taking into consideration the circumstances of historical development. Based on the analysis it will answer the question whether the regulation and collective administration of performers' rights today is sufficient to protect performers' financial interests... [to full text]