The authorship in cinema: an analysis of the Portuguese and European doctrine and jurisprudence

According to the Portuguese legislation of Authors’ Rights, the regime about the cinematographic works was consecrated in Portugal during the year of 1972, being few the alterations made until nowadays. The adjustments related to cinema maintained their inadequacy regarding the national and international filmic industry situation. The current legislation couldn’t follow the cinematic panorama’s evolution and can be harming both the works’ economic exploitation as well as the evolution of cinema itself, not just in Portugal but in all countries which are regulated under the civil rights law and consequently the same authors’ rights basis. It also raises an intellectual property issue, by not giving recognition to all authors in a film. But, who is the author? Is there more than one? Should we approach an artistic view of authorship in cinema or an industrial one, or even both? The problematic that will be approached has been debated in cinema for ages and refers to one of the central questions of the authors’ rights, the concept of authorship. In this paper, it is intended to defend that the authorship concept enshrined in the authors’ rights doesn’t correspond to the existing authors within today’s cinema or even to the different theories regarding authorship. The authors’ rights code defends cinema as a work made in collaboration. However, apart from the film director, the remaining three are authors of works that come from single authorship art fields previously recognized by society. The script and the dialogues are literary works, the soundtrack composition is a musical work and so the film director is isolated as author of the cinema work, the only one whose artistic contribution can’t be separated from the film. It was made a bibliographic study of both the legislation as well as documents regarding authorship, cinema, author’s rights and their doctrine and jurisprudence. The main goal of this study is to alert to the possibility of the law damaging the access of the different European societies to their national cultural and artistic works, harming some of the owners of the intellectual property, as well as delaying the evolution of cinema itself, especially in countries whose industries are underdeveloped.