GAA to assert its copyright entitlements

GAELIC GAMES NEWS:THE GAA is to introduce a standard agreement to cover filming of its matches at all levels. At a time of year when the inter-county season is over the issue of county final dvds and increasingly the live streaming of club matches becomes more visible, but there is also an intention to ensure that the Gaelic games archive is strengthened.

“We’re trying to put a structure on it,” according to the association commercial and marketing manager Dermot Power.

“Below county final level it’s not an issue. At county final level there are issues because the TG4 contract kicks in as well as that of the video/dvd rights holder Sideline Productions.

“We are drawing up an agreement to give to county boards that would apply to anything being recorded in GAA grounds. That applies to dvds and live streaming – if a county board wants to do either. So long as it’s not in conflict with the national rights holder. But you do want to protect the county board from not getting ownership of the copyright.”

It’s not a major commercial issue, but the GAA needs to assert its copyright in order that it gets a copy of all material shot under licence.

“They may have limited appeal, but they have appeal,” says Power. “The issue for us is making sure that copyright is assigned to the GAA and that we have a copy for our archive because there’s a big gap – even at All-Ireland level – in the number of games because of not having copyright and copies.

“They probably get county board permission and operating at that level is not a huge issue. The problem is that when someone goes in to shoot a match there are a number of things we need to make sure of.”

At the top end of the scale Christmas is the busiest time of the year for dvd sales but the market isn’t enormous with end-of-year productions generating demand in the region of about 5,000 although this perhaps reflects the lack of novelty at the top of both hurling and football in the past few years.

“Sideline have done a couple of features as well as the end of year reviews but they’re also producing smaller runs of matches from the past that might only sell a few every year which has the benefit to us of them being available and saves RTÉ or ourselves from having to source them.”

According to Sideline’s Gerry Kelly, the rights holder is never approached about the release of local productions, but he says that the company doesn’t identify that as a problem given the costs involved in filming matches that aren’t being broadcast.

“I suppose we’re not that interested in the county final stuff, as it just wouldn’t be commercial. We have looked at All-Ireland club finals because TG4 broadcast them, but by and large there are so many pirated copies available and a relatively small market that it’s not viable.”

There is a slow-burn interest in old matches, which although not commercially viable for retail distribution, are available on their website, www.dvdsales.ie.

Neither is it just All-Ireland finals that are in demand.

“No matter how big the catalogue there’ll always be someone looking for this match or that match,” says Kelly.

“We have put up a number of lower-profile matches although it’s costly because RTÉ have to go to the archive and source the tape before copying it and that can take between half a day and a full day.

But volume picks up when the catalogue is big enough because people drop in looking for specific matches.”

Recordings are largely restricted to the RTÉ era because although Gael Linn filmed All-Ireland finals in the 1940s and ‘50s, the GAA hadn’t secured copyright on those matches let alone those filmed by British newsreel companies Pathé and Movietone in the 1920s and ’30s.

According to Power there is now a push to try and gather all outstanding footage of Gaelic games.

“We’re looking at the whole issue of the GAA archive because there’s an awful lot of stuff there and we want to put it in order,” he said.

“The possibility of having a GAA archive would make those things a lot more accessible, but the question of getting back rights isn’t as simple as you’d think. We can get access, but not copyright.

“The only time to assert the copyright is before the recording takes place and there was no consciousness of that until more recent times.”