Public performance licences for film screenings

Owning a copy of a film — a disc, a download, a streaming subscription — gives you the right to watch it privately. It does not give you the right to show it to the public. In the US that is the public performance right in the Copyright Act, and a showing is "public" when it happens somewhere open to the public or where a substantial number of people gather beyond a normal circle of family and friends. Most countries draw the line in the same place.

A commercial cinema rarely thinks about this, because the permission comes bundled with the booking: the distributor's agreement is the licence, and the film rental is the fee. Everybody else — a microcinema, a pop-up, a film society, a library, a hotel or a school — needs a licence from whoever controls the non-theatrical rights.

In the US, non-theatrical rights for most studio titles are handled by a small number of licensing agencies, including Swank Motion Pictures, Criterion Pictures and the Motion Picture Licensing Corporation (MPLC). In the UK the equivalent roles are played by Filmbankmedia and MPLC, and Cinema For All supports community exhibitors through the process. For independent and foreign-language titles, it is often the distributor or sales agent directly.

The practical rule: identify who holds the non-theatrical rights for the specific title in your specific country before you announce the screening, not after. An unlicensed public screening is copyright infringement regardless of whether you charged for it.