The High Court has stayed declarations in a dispute between Recorded Artists Actors Performers Limited (RAAP) and Phonographic Performance (Ireland) Limited (PPI) until the case is first listed for directions in the Court of Appeal. The stay will lapse if no appeal is lodged within the time allowed by court rules.
The declarations followed a trial of preliminary issues about the Copyright and Related Rights Act 2000. The substantive action between the parties has not yet been heard. In a judgment delivered on 22 February 2019, Mr Justice Garrett Simons said the preliminary issues had been argued as questions of legal principle, without an agreed set of facts or detailed evidence about the parties’ contracts.
The court declared that calculating payments to individual performers under a distribution scheme is the function of the producer or its representative. The scheme may be agreed between the parties or determined by the Controller.
It also declared that registration as a licensing body does not give an organisation a presumptive right to act for every performer in its registered classes. Applying that conclusion to the case, the court said RAAP could collect equitable remuneration for performers who had assigned or licensed that right to it under section 208(2).
RAAP had submitted that its members empowered it to collect through membership arrangements, rather than assignments of rights. The judge said that distinction had not been argued at the preliminary hearing and that he could not reopen his earlier judgment. He noted that RAAP could appeal the interpretation of section 208.
The stay followed a concern raised at the hearing that PPI might rely on the judgment to stop payments to RAAP under settlement terms connected with an earlier interlocutory application. A letter from PPI’s solicitors said PPI considered there was no legal basis to continue those terms after the order was perfected. The court stayed the declarations until the first Court of Appeal directions hearing; it did not decide the underlying contractual dispute.
The court awarded PPI the costs of the trial of the preliminary issues, to be taxed if the parties could not agree. It reserved the costs of the application to hold that trial for the judge hearing the substantive action. It made no order on the costs of two interlocutory injunction applications, leaving those matters to that judge as well. Separately, the costs order is stayed until the appeal is finally determined, and that stay also lapses if no appeal is lodged in time.