Performers’ and the other rightholders :

Article 3 of the Rome Convention of 1961 defines performers as “actors, singers, musicians, dancers, and other persons who act, sing, deliver, declaim, play in, or otherwise perform literary or artistic works”.

The WIPO Treaty on Performances and Phonograms of 1996 (WPPT) has repeated the same descriptive technique and reference to works, adding the “expressions of folklore”.

Are considered as performers, the “actors, singers, musicians, dancers, and other persons who act, sing, deliver, declaim, play in, interpret, or otherwise perform literary or artistic works or expressions of folklore” (Article 3 a) WPPT).

It has to be noted that, particularly in the musical field, the author and performer can be one single person: the singer or musician performs the work that he or she has written or composed.

In this case, he or she will hold rights as author and as performer.

The rights of authors and performers are linked to their very personality and not to a purely economic, industrial or financial investment.

Unlike the situation of the author, the normal activity of a performer is to perform. The actor performs in a theatre, the musician performs in a concert hall or a stadium, the dancer dances in a show...

In the beginning, the reason why they were granted rights was to compensate for their absence, or more accurately to compensate the substitution of recordings for performances.

The public essentially listens to music through recordings of performances; a live concert taking place today is often just a secondary aspect of the performer's relationship with the public.

Musicians who used to play in restaurants, bars and theatres have been replaced by recorded music. The situation is the same for performers who were employed by broadcasting organizations.

The contact of actors with their public takes essentially place through television, not through theatre live performances.

Rights that are granted to a performer, as soon as the performance is recorded and broadcast on radio or television, constitute a substitute and not a regular use of the work, as is the case for the author.

A specific characteristic of performers' rights is that the exercise of their rights often simultaneously concerns many rightholders of the same category.

A film often realized by one single author and produced by one single producer, generally involves dozens of actors and more.

The performance of a musical work composed by one author may require a performance by more than a hundred musicians.

These are the reasons why collective management constitutes a key element for the exercise of performers' rights.