Contractual Relationships between Creators and Producers in the Audiovisual Sector

Ivan David, Johana Kotišová, Petr Szczepanik

This report provides the first empirically based overview of legal awareness among producers and authors in the Czech Republic, serving primarily as a point of basic orientation regarding their experiences and attitudes and as a starting point for discussion of possible solutions. The report focuses in particular on the legal awareness of individual informants in the area of legal regulation of authors’ contracts in the Czech audiovisual industry. Our primary objective was to determine the extent to which producers, creators, and script editors are—or, conversely, are not—familiar with the rights and obligations arising for them when concluding common types of contracts, whether directly from the explicit wording of contractual provisions or from statutory law. A further objective was to assess the extent to which informants consider contractual matters to be important, or whether they tend to perceive them rather as a marginal aspect of their professional practice. The informants’ practical experience with the conclusion and performance of contracts was also examined. Finally, we investigated their level of satisfaction with the current handling of these issues in the Czech Republic. The legal analysis of contractual relationships is continuously contextualized by brief descriptions of production and creative practice in the Czech media market and is complemented by a sociological commentary on the nature of creative work.

The research report was produced within the project Research on the Impact of Existing Legislation and the European Commission’s Digital Single Market (DSM) Strategy on the Czech Audiovisual Industry: Evaluation of the (Copyright) Legal System and the Preparation of Cultural Policy within the DSM, supported by the Technology Agency of the Czech Republic (Project No. TL01000306).

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