About This Service
Film production rests legally on a set of contracts: transfers of copyright, license agreements and agreements on the creation of works. The Law of Georgia on Copyright and Neighboring Rights imposes strict formulas on each of them: Article 36 governs the transfer of property rights, Article 40 the content of the license contract and its unstated terms, Article 42 the form of the contract, and Article 44 the consequences of breach. This page explains what must enter a film project's contract, what happens when the term, the territory or the manner of use is left unwritten, and which form is required for the deal to stand. In a film project these questions are anything but abstract: the allocation of rights in the script, the music and the visual material depends precisely on these norms, and one imprecise clause can hold up an entire distribution chain.
Transfer of Rights and the Boundaries of the License
The starting rule comes from Article 36: an author or other holder of copyright may transfer all property rights, or part of them, to a successor. For license contracts the law is even more precise: the right to use the work in every manner not directly provided by the license contract belongs to the author or other holder (Article 40). If the specific manner of use is not defined, the contract is deemed concluded for such use as may be considered necessary to fulfill the intention the parties had at its conclusion. Rights granted under a license contract may be passed on to other persons, wholly or partly, only where this is directly provided by the contract; and where the royalty for reproduction is set as a fixed amount, the contract must establish the maximum print run of the work. The rule on sublicensing matters most when a film's materials pass to several distributors: unless the right of onward transfer is written into the contract directly, the chain is cut off by law, and every further transfer already becomes an infringement.