Repeat fees, royalties and residuals

Posted on April 7, 2008

What is Equity going to do to ensure that when productions are re-broadcast either in the UK and overseas or are released on DVD that members are going to be fairly compensated?

To ensure that performers receive repeat fees, royalties and/or residuals it is crucial to ensure that you are engaged on standard Equity contracts. Non-union contracts tend to be issued with buy outs that meant that no payments are due beyond the initial fee structure.

Equity’s Film, Television and Radio department has always relied on members and their agents to alert us to any use of a member’s performance where the right to re-use the work was not paid for in the initial contract. Once you are on an Equity contract you have the right to receive payments for additional uses of your work. Historically the main UK broadcasters, who made most of the programming, made the payment fairly swiftly but the proliferation of channels and new means of delivery coupled with the rapid growth in the role of independent producers, securing payment has become significantly more difficult and time consuming.

Equity is investing a lot of resources to allow us to be more pro-active. Technology has made it a little easier to track and monitor productions across the world and, with the advent of an international numbering scheme, which we hope will be adopted by all broadcasters and other rights holders, similar to that deployed on books, we will slowly improve our ability to monitor and enforce our contracts.

We have also put in place a full time Contract Enforcement Officer whose principle role will be to track down and enforce the terms of members contracts wherever their performance is being used and on whatever platform the performance is being delivered. Further details of our work on contract enforcement are contained on FACTSHEET number 6: Contract Enforcement.

TV is Changing • Equity