Music Contracts in Georgian Law
Music industry agreements are often described through forms borrowed from international practice, and caution is needed here: the Civil Code of Georgia contains no separate contract type called a music contract. Under Georgian law such relationships are built on two real foundations: on one hand, the law of copyright property and personal non-property rights, regulated by the law on copyright, and on the other hand the contract of mandate, under which a manager, producer or publisher acts in the name and at the expense of the artist. The detailed regulation of neighboring rights and royalties lies in the law on copyright; one may rely on the general existence of that law, but when building a music contract as a concrete legal act, it is precisely these two foundations, the transfer of rights and the mandate, that must be used.
Copyright as the Subject Matter of the Contract
The economic core of a music contract is copyright. Under Article 1017 of the Civil Code, the protection of the copyright property and personal non-property rights regulated by copyright law, as well as certain of their neighboring rights, is carried out in accordance with the Georgian law on copyright and neighboring rights. This means that the transfer, licensing and protection of rights in a song or a recording take place within the regime of that special law, and not under the general norms of the Civil Code. Personal non-property rights are linked to the author's personality and their transfer is limited, while property rights are precisely the asset around which publishing, licensing and distribution deals are assembled. When drafting a music contract, one must first distinguish which right passes into which block, and then every clause must be built on these blocks.
Management and Publishing on the Foundation of the Mandate
The legal form of the relationship with a manager or publisher in Georgian law is the contract of mandate. Under Article 709 of the Civil Code, by a contract of mandate the mandatary must perform for the mandator one or more acts in the name and at the expense of the mandator. In the music business this is exactly the construction by which a manager arranges concerts, represents the artist in agreements and manages relationships: the manager acts in the artist's name and at the artist's expense, and the boundaries of the manager's authority are defined by the mandate contract. Everything a manager says or signs in the artist's name must therefore fit within this frame, and the contract should define the scope of authority so precisely that no step taken for the artist lacks a mandate basis.