Video Usage Rights and Footage Ownership in the UAE
The question usually arrives about eighteen months after delivery. A marketing director wants to recut last year's film for a new market, or hand the rushes to a new agency, and nobody can say whether the company is allowed to.
This guide is for the person who signs the production contract. It covers the UAE default for work made for someone else, which reverses the assumption most international contracts are drafted on, why handing over a drive transfers nothing by itself, the four things a valid transfer of rights has to state, the two rights no contract can move, and the five decisions a production agreement has to make so that year three is not a negotiation.
The one line to hold onto
Ownership is the word clients use. Control is what they need. In the UAE, control is decided by four things a contract has to name: the right, the object, the duration and the place of use.
Usage rights in Dubai start with a default most contracts get backwards
Watch out
This article explains how UAE copyright law applies to a commissioned film, for the person who signs the production contract. It is not legal advice, and a company should take its own counsel on its own agreement. No UAE judgment applying these articles to a commissioned brand film was found while researching this piece, so treat the defaults below as the statutory position rather than a settled judicial one.
The governing instrument is Federal Decree-Law No. 38 of 2021 on Copyright and Neighbouring Rights, in force since 2 January 2022, which replaced Federal Law No. 7 of 2002. The law firm Gowling WLG covers the change in outline, though for this subject the article numbers matter more than the summary.
Article 28 sets out the author's economic rights in relation to third parties, and it opens with the words unless otherwise agreed upon in writing. Its first clause is the one to read twice. If the author creates the work for the benefit of another person, the copyright belongs to the person in whose favour it was made.
That runs the opposite way to the assumption carried into most international production contracts, where the producer owns the copyright until an assignment moves it to the client. In the UAE the written agreement is what changes the position, and a project with no rights clause does not sit in neutral territory. It sits in a default that neither party chose on purpose.
The consequence cuts both ways. A client with no written rights clause may hold more here than they expected. A production company with no written rights clause may hold less than it assumes, including the right to put the work on its own showreel.
Handing over the drive is not handing over the rights
Article 13 is the plainest sentence in the law for anyone who has ever received a delivery drive. Unless otherwise agreed, the author's disposal, by any means, of the original copy of the work does not entail the assignment of any economic right over that work. The physical carrier and the rights are two separate questions, and moving one does not move the other.
The article then closes the other direction as well. The party who receives the copy cannot be required, without prior agreement, to let the author reproduce the work, exhibit the original or communicate it to the public. Neither side picks up an implied right over the other's position.
Applied to a real delivery, a drive of rushes is a copy. What the client may do with those rushes is whatever the written agreement says, not whatever the file structure makes physically possible. Two terabytes of ProRes in a cupboard is an archive, not a licence.
Market convention, which is convention rather than UAE law and comes from sources outside this jurisdiction, is that raw footage stays with the production company or is licensed separately, and that buying a copy of the rushes buys a licence rather than the copyright. MovieMaker and the production company Minifridge Media both describe that practice. It is consistent with Article 13 without being required by it.
Good to know
Whether unedited rushes are independently protected works, as distinct from the finished film, is not something the law addresses and not something this research resolved. It also does not need resolving in most cases. Under Article 13 the ownership of the rushes is settled by the contract either way, which is the practical answer.
What a valid transfer has to say
Watch out
Article 15 makes any disposition an author makes of their future intellectual output null and void, with a narrow exception under the Implementing Regulation for a specified number of future works. The blanket clause assigning everything a supplier ever produces for a client is the clause that article is aimed at. A framework agreement that lists the works, or that assigns per project, does the job the blanket clause fails at.
Article 9 sets the form. A transfer or licence of economic rights is valid only if it is made in writing and specifies the transferred right, together with the object of the transfer, the duration and the place of use. Four elements, all of them required.
Then comes the clause that decides most arguments. Under Article 9(2), the author owns all the economic rights that have not been explicitly assigned. Silence favours the author, not the paying party, which is the reverse of how a commercial negotiation usually feels.
So what should a clause be naming? Article 7 answers that. Only the author, their successor or the rights holder may authorise use of a work, and the acts listed there are reproduction, including downloading and electronic storage, acting in any manner, broadcasting, rebroadcasting, public performance, public communication, translation, assimilation, modification, rental, lending and publication in any manner, including making the work available through computers, data or communication networks.
Read against Article 9, a clause saying the client owns everything, forever, everywhere, without naming rights, a term and a territory, does less than it appears to. Naming the acts takes an extra three lines and settles the question.
Consideration is flexible. Article 10 allows payment as a share of revenue, a lump sum, or a combination. Article 11 then lets the author or their successors ask the Civil Court to review the agreed consideration if the agreement appears unfair, or becomes unfair because of later circumstances. A lump-sum assignment is ordinary practice and is not immune from review.
Article 9, Federal Decree-Law 38 of 2021
The four elements a transfer has to state
Anything not explicitly assigned stays with the author under Article 9(2).
Who counts as the author of a film
Clients tend to assume the production company is the sole author of a film. UAE law takes a longer view, and Article 29(1) names the joint authors of an audiovisual, sound or visual work: the scriptwriter or the originator of the written idea, the party who adapts an existing literary work into an audiovisual format, the dialogist, the composer where the score was written specifically for that work, and the director where they exercised effective supervision over its completion. Article 29(2) adds the author of any previous work the film derives from.
Article 26 governs how joint authors sit together. Where the contributions cannot be separated, all joint authors are equal authors unless otherwise agreed in writing, and none of them may exercise the copyright individually except under a prior written agreement between them. Where contributions are distinct and separable, each author may use their own part separately, provided that does not harm the use of the joint work.
The producer has a defined place in this rather than an assumed one. Under Article 29(5), throughout the agreed period of use, the producer is the representative of the authors and their successors in agreements on the use of the work, is deemed the publisher, and holds the publisher's rights on the work and its copies for the purposes of financial exploitation, unless a written agreement says otherwise. The law defines that producer functionally, as the person who provides the necessary facilities for producing the audiovisual work and assumes responsibility for it, which is not automatically the party who paid for it.
Article 27 covers collective works, meaning work created by several authors under the direction and management of a person who publishes it in their name, where the individual contributions cannot be separated. Unless agreed otherwise, that person alone may exercise the moral and economic rights.
Employees are handled separately. Under Article 28(2), where an employee creates a work during their work, related to the employer's activities, on the employer's direct or indirect instruction, or using the employer's experience, information, tools, machines or materials, the economic rights belong to the employer, taking into account the intellectual effort of the worker. Article 28(3) returns the rights to the employee for work unrelated to the employer's business and made without the employer's resources.
Three articles, three defaults, all of them opening with an unless-otherwise-agreed formula. They point at the same practical conclusion. The contract decides, and where it is silent the answer depends on which characterisation applies.
Good to know
A freelance director, editor or DOP engaged for a single production is not an employee, so Article 28(2) does not resolve their position. Their rights run through Articles 28(1), 29 and 9 instead, which is where a chain-of-title gap usually appears. The crew's own paperwork feeds the client's title, and it is worth asking the production company how theirs is written.
Article 29(1)
The joint authors of an audiovisual work
| Named in the law | On a brand film, usually |
|---|---|
| The scriptwriter, or the originator of the written idea | Whoever wrote the treatment the film was made from |
| The party adapting an existing literary work to an audiovisual format | Rare in brand work, common where a book or campaign text is the source |
| The dialogist | The writer of the interview questions and voiceover script |
| The composer, where the score was written for that work | The bespoke score, as distinct from a licensed track |
| The director, where they exercised effective supervision | Frequently a freelancer, which is where chain of title thins |
Article 29(2) adds the author of any earlier work the film is derived from.
What no contract can move
Good to know
Since attribution cannot be assigned away, agreeing the credit and the production company's portfolio use at contract stage costs nothing and removes the only part of the arrangement a contract cannot force. Where the client holds the economic rights under Article 28(1), the showreel is a use of the client's property, so it belongs in the agreement as an express carve-out rather than as an assumption.
Article 5 gives the author and their universal successor perpetual moral rights which may not prescribe or be assigned. There are four: the right to decide the first publication of the work, the right to claim paternity, the right to prohibit any modification that distorts the work or prejudices the author's reputation, and the right to apply to the Civil Court to withdraw the work from circulation on justifying grounds. Article 16 gives performers and their successors an equivalent perpetual and unassignable set, covering attribution of the performance and alteration or distortion that would prejudice their reputation.
The practical reading matters more than the theory. A client can acquire every economic right in a film and still not acquire, as a matter of right, the ability to recut it in a way that distorts it and damages the author's reputation, or to strip attribution. In ordinary versioning, cutting a two-minute film to thirty seconds for a paid placement, none of this bites. It bites at the edges, and the edges are avoidable.
This is also why the market word buy-out does not do what people think in this jurisdiction. It has no statutory basis in UAE law. What it describes is an assignment of economic rights under Article 9, and no amount of money moves the rights in Articles 5 and 16.
The preamble to the law records UAE accession to the Beijing Treaty on Audiovisual Performances by Federal Decree No. 20 of 2017, which is the international frame behind the performer provisions.
Two terabytes of rushes in a cupboard is an archive. Whether it is also a licence is a question the contract answers.
Talent, and the usage window
The question that generates real disputes is how long the face in the film can keep appearing. Article 17 gives performers exclusive economic rights over broadcasting an unrecorded performance, fixing it on a sound or audiovisual recording, reproducing that fixation, renting and distributing copies, and communicating it to the public. Recording a live performance, renting it for commercial return, or making it available without prior consent from the rights owner is a prohibited use.
Article 29(6) then resolves the film case. Where the performer agrees to the audiovisual fixation of their performance, the exclusive economic rights to license the use of that fixed performance transfer to the producer of the fixation, or to whoever is authorised to exercise them, unless otherwise agreed in writing between the performer and the producer.
So the release does two jobs at once. It is the performer's agreement to the fixation, which is what triggers the statutory transfer, and it is the only place a contrary term can live. A twelve-month usage window is a contractual term, not the statutory default, and if it is not written into the release it does not exist. Article 20 protects performers' economic rights for fifty years from the year of the performance, or from the year of fixation where the performance is fixed on a sound recording, which is the horizon the default sits against.
Commercial usage cycles in the wider industry commonly run six to twelve months with a renewal clause rather than perpetuity, and a buy-out is a negotiated scope rather than an unlimited licence. Both points come from industry sources outside the UAE, Voquent and Mandy, and they describe convention rather than law here.
Good to know
A second regime applies to anyone identifiable on camera. Legal commentary on Federal Decree-Law No. 45 of 2021 on the Protection of Personal Data, in force since 2 January 2022, sets out that personal data includes a picture or voice by which a natural person can be identified, that a facial image is treated as biometric data, and that processing requires the data subject's consent outside the listed exceptions. Those points are carried from advisory summaries rather than from the primary text, and how the data regime interacts with a copyright release for crowd or staff footage was not resolved in this research.
The rights inside the film you already own
Owning the film does not clear what is inside it, and music is the clearest case. A track carries two separate rights, the master recording and the underlying composition, usually controlled by different parties, and a commercial use needs both cleared. The industry sources Foxi and Soundcharts both set out that two-rights structure.
Sync licences are then scoped by term, territory, media and nature of use, as the licensor Resilient Music describes. A licence bought for a launch campaign does not automatically cover the same film three years later in another market, which is how a film a company genuinely owns becomes unusable.
UAE law makes the same point from the other side. Article 7 puts modification and assimilation among the acts only the rights holder may authorise, so recutting licensed third-party material into a new asset is a licensed act rather than a free one.
Two smaller provisions are worth knowing. Article 8 disapplies the rental right for audiovisual works where rental does not affect their normal use. And Article 31 puts copyright in architectural designs with the property owner unless explicitly agreed otherwise, which is useful background for any film built around a named building.
Article 3 draws the boundary that decides most creative disputes. Protection does not cover ideas, procedures, working methods, mathematical concepts, principles or abstract facts, only their innovative expression. A concept described in a treatment is not protected as a concept. The written expression of it is.
Duration, registration and what infringement costs
Article 20 sets the terms. An author's economic rights run for life plus fifty years, counted from the first day of the year following death. Joint works run from the death of the last surviving author. Collective works with a juristic-person author run fifty years from first publication. Performers get fifty years, producers of phonograms fifty years, broadcasting organisations twenty years, and works of applied art twenty-five years from first publication.
Registration is not the source of the right. Article 4 provides that non-registration does not breach any protection or right established by the law, while the Ministry's registers are a reference for the work's data and ownership. Registration is evidence, and evidence is worth having, but the right exists without it.
On enforcement, Article 39 provides for imprisonment of not less than two months and a fine of not less than AED 10,000 and not more than AED 100,000, or either penalty, for the infringements it lists where there is no written permission from the author or the neighbouring-rights holder, with the penalty multiplied by the number of works, performances, programmes or recordings involved. On a repeat offence it becomes not less than six months and AED 100,000 to AED 500,000. Article 40 carries a heavier band, not less than six months and AED 100,000 to AED 700,000, rising on repeat to not less than nine months and AED 500,000 to AED 1,000,000.
Good to know
Those figures are the statutory penalties for infringement, and they are not the point of this article. The argument here is that a written clause prevents the problem, not that a fine punishes it. They also have nothing to do with what a film costs to make.
Article 20, protection periods
How long the rights last years from the reference date
Scale 0 to 50 years. An individual author's economic rights sit outside this scale, running for life plus fifty years from the year following death.
Five decisions, made once, at the point where they cost nothing to make.
The five decisions a production contract has to make
Read as decisions rather than clauses, the whole subject reduces to five, plus two pieces of housekeeping.
First, the film rights. Name the acts from Article 7 that the client may perform, with the term and the territory, because Article 9(2) leaves anything unnamed with the author. Second, the rushes. State whether the client receives them, whether that is a licence or an assignment, and for which uses, since Article 13 means the drive settles nothing on its own. Third, the production company's portfolio use, written in rather than assumed. Fourth, the talent window, which has to appear in the release because Article 29(6) otherwise sends the licensing rights to the producer. Fifth, the music term and territory, scoped separately from the ownership of the film itself.
The housekeeping: keep consent records for identifiable people alongside the performer releases, and avoid blanket future-works assignments, which Article 15 makes void outside a narrow regulated exception.
Who you hire is part of the answer here. Grolez Films writes the rights clause the way the law is drafted, naming the right, the object, the duration and the place of use, deciding the rushes explicitly, putting the talent window in the release and scoping the music separately, so that in year three a client knows exactly what they hold. A one-page quote with a line saying full ownership included transfers less than it promises under Article 9, and the gap only shows up when someone tries to use the film.
1 · The film rights
The acts from Article 7 the client may perform, with the term and the territory. Anything unnamed stays with the author.
2 · The rushes
Delivered or not, licence or assignment, and for which uses. Article 13 means the drive decides nothing.
3 · Portfolio use
Where the client holds the rights, the showreel is a use of their property. Written in, not assumed.
4 · The talent window
In the release, or it does not exist. Article 29(6) sets the default the other way.
5 · The music term
Term, territory, media and nature of use, scoped separately from the film's ownership.
Housekeeping
Consent records for identifiable people, and no blanket future-works assignment, which Article 15 makes void.
Common questions
We paid for the film. Do we own it?
Probably, but only because of a default that a contract can reverse. Article 28(1) of Federal Decree-Law No. 38 of 2021 provides that unless otherwise agreed in writing, where an author creates a work for the benefit of another person, the copyright belongs to the person in whose favour it was made. Two other articles supply defaults that can point differently, which is why the written agreement is what actually decides it.
Does paying for the film get us the raw footage?
No, and the law is explicit about the distinction. Article 13 provides that unless otherwise agreed, an author's disposal of the original copy of a work does not entail assignment of any economic right in it. Handing over a drive is not handing over rights, and the reverse is also true: rights can be assigned without any obligation to deliver the rushes. Both belong in the contract as separate items.
What does a buy-out actually mean in the UAE?
It is a market word rather than a statutory one. What it describes is an assignment under Article 9, which is valid only in writing and only where it specifies the transferred right, the object of the transfer, its duration and its place of use. It cannot reach moral rights, which under Articles 5 and 16 are perpetual and may not be assigned.
Can we re-edit the film ourselves in two years?
That depends on what was assigned, and on one limit that cannot be contracted away. The author's moral right to prohibit distorting modification is perpetual and unassignable, as is the equivalent right performers hold under Article 16. So a re-edit is a contract question first and a moral rights question second, and the agreement should say expressly what re-versioning is permitted.
Do we need to register the copyright?
No. Article 4 provides that registration is not a condition of protection and that non-registration does not breach any protection or right established by the law. The Ministry's registers serve as a reference for the work's data and ownership, which can be useful evidentially, but the right exists without them.
Who counts as an author of a film?
More people than clients expect. Article 29(1) names the joint authors of an audiovisual work as the scriptwriter or originator of the written idea, the person adapting an existing literary work, the dialogist, the composer where the score was written for that work, and the director where they exercised effective supervision. Article 29(5) then makes the producer the representative of those authors during the agreed period of use, unless a written agreement says otherwise.
What has to be in the contract, at minimum?
Four things, because Article 9 requires them for a licence or transfer to be valid at all: which right is granted, over what, for how long, and where. Then two more that the law leaves to you: whether raw material is delivered, and what re-editing is permitted. An agreement that answers all six is one nobody has to argue about later.
What to hold onto, in one pass
In the UAE, a work created for the benefit of another person carries copyright for that person unless otherwise agreed in writing. Delivery of the drive transfers no rights by itself. A transfer is valid only if it is written and states the right, the object, the duration and the place of use, and anything not explicitly assigned stays with the author. Moral rights stay with the author and the performer whatever the contract says. Five decisions are worth making before the shoot rather than after: the film rights, the rushes, portfolio use, the talent window and the music term.
This remains an operator's briefing rather than legal advice. Take your own counsel on your own agreement before you rely on any of it.
Grolez Films: the rights clause, written with the law open
We treat the rights schedule as part of the production plan rather than as paperwork that happens elsewhere. The acts named, the term and territory stated, the rushes decided, the talent window written into the release, the music scoped to where the film will actually run, and the portfolio carve-out agreed while everyone is still on good terms.
Luis Grolez, the founder, pitches this personally, founder to founder. Get in touch about a specific brief and a specific quarter.
Sources and methodology
The rights position in this article is taken from the official English text of Federal Decree-Law No. 38 of 2021 on Copyright and Neighbouring Rights, published by the Ministry of Economy, and the article numbers cited are Articles 4, 5, 9, 13, 15, 16, 27, 28 and 29. Where the law supplies competing defaults, the article says so rather than choosing between them: Article 27 on collective works, Article 28(1) on works created for the benefit of another, and Article 29(5) on the producer's representation of authors all open with an unless-otherwise-agreed formula, and no UAE case law reconciling them for an advertising film was located. The market term buy-out has no statutory basis and is described here as an assignment under Article 9. Whether unedited rushes are separately protected works, as distinct from the finished film, is not addressed in the law and is not asserted here. This article is informational and is not legal advice. Have your production agreement reviewed by counsel before relying on it. Prepared 11 August 2026.
- Federal Decree-Law No. 38 of 2021 on Copyright and Neighbouring Rights, official English text: moet.gov.ae
- Gowling WLG, the new UAE copyright law, key takeaways: gowlingwlg.com