MSMN Analysis
Explainer based on published EU copyright law, Irish transposing regulations and Screen Ireland strategy — not legal advice and not an exclusive interview package.

Who owns the Irish story? IP rights after the DSM Directive

A European viewer who finishes an Irish drama, a TG4 crime series or a Cartoon Saloon feature is consuming someone else’s intellectual property. The industrial question behind the credit roll is whether the people who wrote, directed, composed or performed that work keep a meaningful interest when the title travels — or whether the travelling is done by a company that bought the rights out, cheaply, at development. Ireland’s screen strategy now says the quiet part in a public plan. Fís Athnuaite, Screen Ireland’s 2025–2029 strategy, puts IP generation and fair treatment of IP on the agenda for publicly supported projects. European copyright law, via the Digital Single Market Directive, is the other half of that sentence.

This is not a production-spend piece. It is the rights piece: what Directive (EU) 2019/790 changed, how Ireland wrote it into the Copyright and Related Rights Act 2000, and why a small-market industry cannot treat “the streamer owns everything” as a law of nature.

What the DSM Directive actually added

The 2019 Directive on copyright in the Digital Single Market was sold in public as an Article 17 fight about upload filters. That article matters: S.I. No. 567 of 2021, Ireland’s transposing instrument, states that an online content-sharing service provider performs an act of communication to the public when it gives access to works uploaded by its users. Platforms that organise and profit from user uploads are not mere hosts for that purpose. Irish and European musicians already lived the prequel through licensing bodies. Film and television writers live the sequel whenever a clip economy becomes the discovery economy.

Less televised, and more important to a production lawyer, are the author-contract chapters. The Directive requires transparency about the exploitation of works, a contract-adjustment mechanism when the original deal is disproportionately low relative to later revenues, and — in many Member States’ transpositions — a right of revocation if the work is not exploited. It also created a neighbouring right for press publishers and rules on text-and-data mining, education and cultural-heritage exceptions. Ireland’s 2021 regulations “strengthen the rights and protections afforded to various categories of rightholders” and further amend the 2000 Act. That is the official description. The practical description is: you can now ask what became of your work, and in some cases reopen the money.

Software authors were carved out of some equitable-remuneration logics; games sit awkwardly across software and audiovisual. Screen writers, directors and composers sit inside the audiovisual core the Directive was written to rebalance against platforms and large on-demand services.

Collective management is the Irish transmission belt. IMRO for music, IVARO and other societies for visual artists, and guild agreements for screen writers are how individual creators meet a streamer or a platform without a personal Brussels docket. The DSM transparency and contract-adjustment tools are only as strong as the information those societies and guilds can extract.

Public money, private copyright

Screen Ireland’s strategy language on IP is not a statute. It is a funding policy with teeth if the agency uses it. Public support — development loans, production funding, distribution support — can be conditioned on Irish companies retaining rights, or on recoupment and backend that do not vanish at the first international partnership. Fís Athnuaite’s industry-development objective talks about building Irish companies that can compete globally, prioritising European co-productions, and putting fair treatment of IP on the agenda for publicly supported projects.

That agenda collides with a financing fact MSMN has already quoted from the trade press: Ireland still cannot fund Irish shows solely from Ireland. When a British broadcaster, a European streamer or a US platform deficit-finances the gap, it asks for territory, term, and often copyright. The “fair treatment” fight is then about what is licensed rather than assigned, what is reserved for Ireland and the EU, and whether the Irish company remains the producer of record for sequels and spin-offs.

Section 481 does not settle ownership. The credit follows eligible Irish expenditure by a producer company. It does not, by itself, require that company to own the finished IP. A cultural certificate can be issued for a qualifying film whose copyright sits in a London or Los Angeles special-purpose vehicle. Strategy can nag. Tax law will not, unless the Oireachtas writes a new condition.

European co-production treaties and the European Convention on Cinematographic Co-production are the other ownership machines. They decide nationality for quota and aid purposes. They do not automatically give the Irish writer a backend point. Nationality of the work and ownership of the copyright are cousins, not twins.

Platforms, press, and the clip economy

Article 17’s Irish face is the reason a music or clip platform cannot shrug that users did the uploading. For screen talent, the live issue is often discovery without licence: a scene that becomes a meme, a recap channel, a sports or entertainment clip account. Those uses can help a first hit travel. They can also be the only place a second season is discussed if the official catalogue buries the title. Rights-holders then choose between takedowns that kill oxygen and licences that they may not have the leverage to negotiate.

Press publishers’ neighbouring right is the newsroom cousin. Irish digital titles use it, where they can, to seek remuneration from platform reuse of headlines and snippets. It is not a screenwriter’s tool. It is part of the same political idea: the platform that organises the audience should not treat the work as raw material.

AI training is the 2026 extension of that idea. Text-and-data-mining exceptions in the Directive include opt-out machinery that rightholders are now trying to make real. Irish authors’ organisations have treated unlicensed training as a new unlicensed reproduction. The Commission’s wider copyright and AI file will move faster than any one Screen Ireland clause. Creators who do not reserve rights in machine-readable form may find the reservation was theoretical.

What European audiences should listen for

Three public tests matter more than a contract they will never see. First, whether publicly funded Irish projects still have an Irish company as the long-term rights holder, or only as a production-services vendor. Second, whether transparency reports under DSM-style contracts ever surface in guild or society bargaining — an unglamorous PDF that says what a title earned in France. Third, whether Irish-language and small-company IP is treated as European genre worth retaining, the way CRÁ / Boglands was sold as crime rather than as a domestic obligation.

Viewers do not need to recite Article 17. They need to know that a title’s second life — the remix, the clip, the second season, the game, the format sale — is an ownership question. Ireland can host craft without owning stories. Fís Athnuaite says it does not want that to be the whole business. Copyright law after 2019 gives creators more paper. The unfinished work is using it when the deficit financier is the largest company in the room.

Format sales are the blunt test. An Irish crime template that travels as a local remake in another Member State can be the most valuable copyright the original company ever owns — or a one-off fee that vanished in the first financing memo. European public funders have started asking where format rights sit. Ireland’s strategy language is in the same family. Whether application forms for Screen Ireland production support start requiring a rights map, not only a recoupment waterfall, will tell producers if “fair treatment of IP” is a slogan or a condition.

Sources

• Directive (EU) 2019/790 on copyright and related rights in the Digital Single Market: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dir/2019/790/oj
• S.I. No. 567/2021, European Union (Copyright and Related Rights in the Digital Single Market) Regulations 2021: https://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/2021/si/567/
• Copyright and Related Rights Act 2000: https://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/2000/act/28/enacted/en/html
• Screen Ireland, Fís Athnuaite Strategic Plan 2025–2029: https://www.screenireland.ie/strategic-plan-2025-2029
• European Commission, copyright in the Digital Single Market: https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/copyright-legislation
• IMRO, about collective licensing: https://imro.ie/