[The IPKat] [Guest post] Can performers' rights be bought out at all? Brazil's new Dance Professionals Act revives a 1978 assignment ban for the streaming age

[Eleonora Rosati]

[Guest post] Can performers' rights be bought out at all? Brazil's new Dance Professionals Act revives a 1978 assignment ban for the streaming age

 Eleonora Rosati Friday, June 12, 2026 - assignment, Brazil, copyright, dance, Guest post, performers' rights, related rights, transfers, uiz Guilherme Valente

The IPKat has received and is pleased to host the following guest contribution by Katfriend Luiz Guilherme Valente regarding the recently adopted Dance Professionals Act in Brazil. Here’s what he writes:

Can performers' rights be bought out at all? Brazil's new Dance Professionals Act revives a 1978 assignment ban for the streaming age

by Luiz Guilherme Valente

What does dance have to do with residuals, streaming revenues and the contractual buy-out of performers' rights? In Brazil, perhaps more than one might expect.

Published on 29 April 2026, International Dance Day, Law No. 15,396/2026 regulates dance workers, including choreographers, dancers and dance directors. Most of the statute is labour law. But Article 7 should make IP lawyers sit up:

The assignment, or promise of assignment, of authors' rights and related rights arising from the provision of professional services is prohibited. Sole paragraph: The authors' rights and related rights of dance professionals shall be due in connection with each exhibition of the work. (author's translation)

The wording is almost identical to Article 13 of Law No. 6,533/1978, which regulates artists and entertainment workers more generally. That provision has spent nearly five decades in legal limbo: never repealed, never reconciled with Brazil's Copyright Act (Law No. 9,610/1998), and never coherently applied by the courts. Its reinstatement in 2026 reopens a question the audiovisual industry has long treated as settled: can performers' rights be bought out under Brazilian law?

A rule that never died, but was never quite alive

The 1978 rule survived an early constitutional challenge before the Brazilian Supreme Court. The basic idea was that the law could prevent definitive assignments while allowing temporary authorisations: the artist may license rights, but cannot be stripped of ownership as a condition of getting the job.

Then came the current Copyright Act, which created a general regime for transferring economic rights while leaving the 1978 statute in place. Did the new regime impliedly displace the assignment ban? Does it apply only to employment relationships, or also to autonomous professional services? Brazilian courts and commentators have given different answers, sometimes treating the provision as valid and sometimes reading it into near irrelevance.

The uncertainty is partly terminological. Brazilian law often uses "direitos autorais" as an umbrella expression covering both authors' rights and related rights. Yet Law No. 6,533/1978, and now the Dance Professionals Act, refer to "direitos autorais e conexos", a technically awkward formulation. If the 1978 law was aimed mainly at performers, was it meant to cover authors' rights held by writers, choreographers or designers, or only performers' related rights? This too has been disputed.

The labour law character of the statutes adds another layer. Some read Article 13 as applying only where the artist creates or performs within an employment relationship, not in every autonomous service contract. The wording, however, refers to rights arising from professional services, without clarifying whether this means subordinated employment only or services more broadly. The same ambiguity now appears in Article 7.

Brazilian dubbing disputes, including cases before the Superior Court of Justice and the São Paulo Court of Justice, illustrate the incoherence, as I have analysed elsewhere (in Portuguese). When a recorded performance was reused, courts had to decide whether the initial session fee authorised later uses and whether further remuneration was due. Some decisions treated later exploitation as compensable. Others treated payment for the session as sufficient. No stable doctrine emerged on what the assignment ban requires.

Why the 2026 re-enactment matters beyond dance

Dance is hardly the dominant category of streaming content. But reproducing the 1978 language twenty-eight years after the Copyright Act has implications beyond the sector.

The first consequence is legislative. The implied-repeal argument becomes harder to maintain when Congress has now chosen the same solution twice: rights arising from artistic service relationships should not simply disappear into a one-time buy-out.

The second is conceptual. The new statute weakens the argument that the ban is really about performers' related rights, rather than authors' rights proper. The Dance Professionals Act covers choreographers and performer-creators, and choreography is protected as an authorial work under the Copyright Act. For one creative sector, the prohibition now clearly reaches authors' rights as well as related rights.

The friction with industry practice is obvious. Production and streaming business models depend on broad, predictable rights clearance. What does remuneration for each "exhibition" mean when a work sits permanently in an on-demand catalogue: each stream, each licensing window, or the making available itself? Can producers still obtain licences functionally equivalent to an assignment, under a prohibition that reaches even the promise of assignment? Or does Brazilian law preserve an unwaivable remuneration right?

Residuals without a residuals system

Internationally, the problem is familiar: performers and creators locked into buy-outs that capture none of the downstream value of their work. It underlies the DSM Directive's fair remuneration chapter, European Union equitable remuneration schemes, and the residuals disputes that fuelled the 2023 Hollywood strikes.

Brazil's instrument is blunter. The 1978 and 2026 statutes combine a prohibition on assignment with remuneration for each exhibition, but without collective management infrastructure, transparency obligations or tariffs. They do not create a conventional residuals system. They create something stranger: a statutory refusal to let artistic participation be absorbed by an upfront transfer.

A similar legislative instinct appears in Bill No. 4,968/2024, currently pending before the Brazilian Senate. It would create an unwaivable and inalienable remuneration right for online communication to the public of works, phonograms, performances and broadcasts, including video-on-demand and social media. The Senate's own explanation describes that remuneration as residual, operating independently of contracts and without requiring new authorisation for each use.

Across the 1978 statute, the 2026 re-enactment and the pending bill, Brazilian law repeatedly resists the idea that artistic and creative participation should disappear into a one-time buy-out. Whether courts will finally take the legislature at its word is a question not only for the dance sector, but for anyone clearing performers' rights in Brazil.

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