Film and
entertainment

The commitment of De Koning Vergouwen to the film world already dates back to our early years. Over the past 30+ years not one question in this industry has remained underexposed in our firm: from the first film ideas, film financing, production, distribution, digital projection, to internet exhibition rights.

A film production interweaves various different fields of law. The other day a producer came to see us because his film had to be withdrawn from the market: a fifteen year old boy had participated in the film without his parents’ permission. An easy detail to oversee when a boy turns 16 during the production of the film.

From the legal point of view each film is a chain of title and interests. Actors, cameramen, novelists and financiers, but also rightfully entitled parties of brands or music and picture fragments are associated. If only just one right is not correctly determined beforehand, the complete production will collapse like a house of cards. To make the whole matter even more complex it happens quite often that a film project changes producer or country halfway, making it difficult to find out if all rights and liabilities have indeed been legally settled.

Often De Koning Vergouwen will also act on behalf of distributors in securing internet rights and remove illegal copies from the internet. For instance our firm regularly contacts a company like YouTube on broadcasting or transmission rights regarding fragments.

In short a film is a creative product that cannot do without legal assistance. De Koning Vergouwen has offered that assistance for many years in the widest sense of the word, both by flexibly applying the most varied fields of law, and by steering a middle course between parties and interests, while at a first glance parties seemed to have drifted further and further apart.