The Rome Convention 1961: Performers, Producers and Broadcasters

In one line

The Rome Convention protects the people who bring works to the public, the performer, the record producer and the broadcaster, and India is not a party to it.

In exam wording: the International Convention for the Protection of Performers, Producers of Phonograms and Broadcasting Organisations, concluded at Rome on 26 October 1961 and in force from 18 May 1964, is administered jointly by WIPO, the International Labour Organization and UNESCO, and confers on performers the possibility of preventing certain acts, on producers of phonograms the right to authorise or prohibit direct or indirect reproduction, and on broadcasting organisations the rights set out in Article 13.

Why the law has this at all

Berne protects authors and says nothing about anybody else. The composer of a song is an author. The singer who records it is not. The company that pays for the recording is not. The station that broadcasts it is not.

Each of them invests and each of them can be copied. By the 1930s recording and broadcasting had made that a commercial problem, and the International Labour Organization took an interest because performers are workers.

So Rome protects "neighbouring rights", also called related rights, and the phrase means rights neighbouring on copyright and not part of it.

Article 1 makes the relationship explicit: protection granted under this Convention shall leave intact and shall in no way affect the protection of copyright in literary and artistic works, and consequently no provision may be interpreted as prejudicing such protection.

Definitions, Article 3

Performers means actors, singers, musicians, dancers and other persons who act, sing, deliver, declaim, play in, or otherwise perform literary or artistic works.

Phonogram means any exclusively aural fixation of sounds of a performance or of other sounds.

Producer of phonograms means the person who, or the legal entity which, first fixes the sounds of a performance or other sounds.

Publication means the offering of copies of a phonogram to the public in reasonable quantity.

Reproduction means the making of a copy or copies of a fixation.

Broadcasting means the transmission by wireless means for public reception of sounds or of images and sounds.

Rebroadcasting means the simultaneous broadcasting by one broadcasting organisation of the broadcast of another.

National treatment, Articles 2, 4, 5 and 6

Article 2 defines national treatment as the treatment accorded by the domestic law of the Contracting State in which protection is claimed to performers who are its nationals, to producers of phonograms who are its nationals and to broadcasts of organisations having their headquarters on its territory.

Article 4 fixes the points of attachment for performers: the performance takes place in another Contracting State; or it is incorporated in a phonogram protected under Article 5; or it is carried by a broadcast protected under Article 6.