Federal Act on Copyright and Related Rights
(Copyright Act, CopA)

¹Any per­son who law­fully makes an au­dio-visu­al work avail­able in such a way that per­sons may ac­cess it from a place and at a time chosen by them owes re­mu­ner­a­tion to the au­thors who cre­ated the au­dio-visu­al work.

²No re­mu­ner­a­tion is owed if:

the au­thor or their heirs per­son­ally ex­ploit the ex­clus­ive right to mak­ing the work avail­able; or

the au­dio-visu­al work is one of the fol­low­ing:

com­pany pro­file films, in­dus­tri­al films, ad­vert­ising or pro­mo­tion­al films, com­puter games, ser­vices or com­mis­sioned works by broad­cast­ing or­gan­isa­tions or oth­er works in the field of journ­al­ism that are cre­ated un­der an em­ploy­ment con­tract or that are com­mis­sioned,

archived works of broad­cast­ing or­gan­isa­tions (Art. 22a),

orphan works (Art. 22b).

³The right to re­mu­ner­a­tion is in­ali­en­able and un­waiv­able and only the au­thors are en­titled to claim it; it sub­sti­tutes any re­mu­ner­a­tion for the con­trac­tu­ally agreed use of the au­dio-visu­al work. It may only be as­ser­ted by the ap­proved col­lect­ive rights man­age­ment or­gan­isa­tions.

⁴Au­thors of an au­dio-visu­al work which was not pro­duced by a per­son dom­i­ciled or with a re­gistered of­fice in Switzer­land only have a right to re­mu­ner­a­tion if the coun­try in which the au­dio-visu­al work was pro­duced also provides for a col­lect­ively man­aged re­mu­ner­a­tion right for au­thors for the mak­ing avail­able of the work.

⁵This art­icle does not ap­ply to mu­sic con­tained in au­dio-visu­al works. The au­thors of mu­sic­al works have a right to an equit­able share of the pro­ceeds from their col­lect­ively man­aged ex­clus­ive rights.