Who Owns the Event? Navigating commercial rights in the UAE event industry

In-Brief:

• An event organiser may believe it owns “the event”. A sponsor may believe it has bought “exclusivity”. A broadcaster may believe it has bought “media rights”. A venue may believe it controls “on-site advertising”. All may be partly correct, and yet their rights can collide.
• An event is rarely a single commercial asset. It is a collection of rights which may be owned, licensed, shared or restricted by different parties. For organisers, sponsors, venues and rights holders, identifying who owns or controls each right is an important part of event planning. Getting this wrong can be costly: an organiser may inadvertently grant overlapping rights, promise a sponsor exclusivity it cannot deliver, or purport to license a right it does not actually own.
• This article examines the risks of ambiguous drafting in relation to commercial rights ownership. These risks are best managed at the outset (before rights are negotiated, sold or licensed) by undertaking a comprehensive commercial rights mapping exercise and ensuring all proposed arrangements are consistent with the underlying rights and the applicable regulatory framework.

An event is a bundle of rights

The starting point is to avoid treating “the event” as one indivisible proprietary interest.

An event may involve separate rights in its name, logo, format, footage, photography, tickets, hospitality, merchandise, sponsorship inventory, broadcast, streaming, digital content and data, as well as rights relating to participants, providers, performers, attendees and other individuals. Those rights can be divided further by territory, platform, product category and duration.

A sponsor may be granted exclusive rights as an event’s “official partner”. A broadcaster may separately have advertising rights during the broadcast. A venue may have existing rights over signage or hospitality. A federation may have an international sponsor in the same commercial category. A performer, athlete or team may have a separate endorsement agreement with a competing brand.

The organiser may therefore own the event brand while lacking unrestricted authority to commercialise everything connected with the event. The legal question should not simply be “Who owns the event?”. It should be:

Who owns or controls each relevant right, what has already been granted, what restrictions apply, and what exactly can be granted to the proposed rights-holder?

Regulation of commercial rights in the UAE

In the UAE, contractual rights operate alongside federal intellectual property legislation and emirate level regulatory regimes governing the organisation, licensing, naming and operation of events.

At federal level, the UAE's intellectual-property regime provides important protections for interests exploited through an event. Federal Decree-Law No. 38 of 2021 on Copyright and Neighbouring Rights protects original creative works, including audiovisual works and performances. Federal Decree-Law No. 36 of 2021 on Trademarks is also relevant to event names, logos and other brand assets. A contractual grant of an event-related right must therefore be considered alongside the underlying registered or registrable IP rights. An organiser cannot grant a sponsor greater rights than it possesses and a contractual licence does not create ownership.

The UAE's event licensing regime applies broadly to events organised in the Emirate, including entertainment, marketing, sports, arts, cultural, educational, tourism and other events. Permits, licenses and approvals are required for entertainment, sporting, charity, religious or business events, with ticketed events also subject to ticketing requirements.

Additionally, from December 1, 2026, the UAE's new collective-management framework will introduce a formal licensing and tariff regime for commercial use of music, including at concerts and similar events. The framework for music licensing is established through Ministerial Resolution No. 136 of 2026 and the Collective Management in Music Guide, operating under the UAE's Federal Copyright and Neighbouring Rights Law and its Executive Regulations.

Permission from an artist or performer does not necessarily address all rights in the music used at an event. Copyright in the underlying musical composition, rights in the sound recording and neighbouring rights in the performance can belong to different rights holders, and the organiser may need several separate contractual and statutory licences. These requirements can affect the commercial rights an organiser is able to offer.

Over-promising and under-delivering commercial rights

Sponsorship provides one of the clearest examples of where event commercial rights management can be tricky. A sponsor paying a significant fee is not simply buying a logo placement. It may be buying a defined bundle of association rights, hospitality rights, content rights, digital rights, activation rights and category exclusivity; each element traceable to its underlying owner.

If a sponsor is promised a particular event format, venue configuration, audience capacity, branding opportunity or activation that the relevant regulatory approval does not permit, the organiser may find itself contractually committed to deliver something it cannot lawfully provide.

Contracts should therefore identify which regulatory approvals are required, who is responsible for obtaining them, whether the commercial arrangement is conditional upon approval, and what happens if approval is refused, withdrawn or materially restricted.

Sponsors increasingly expect exclusivity, but “exclusive sponsor” is rarely sufficiently precise. Exclusivity must be defined by reference to the relevant product or service category, territory, event area, media, platform and duration, together with any agreed exceptions. Large events commonly involve tiered and multi-year sponsorships that must be mapped to avoid future conflicts. An organiser granting a bank “exclusive financial services rights” must ensure no conflict arises through, for example, the ticketing provider’s own commercial relationship with a competing financial institution.

The issue is not necessarily that any party has acted improperly. The problem is that the underlying rights were never mapped properly.

Rights can be held outside the UAE

The dovetailing of commercial rights is more complicated where the event is part of an international competition or brand ecosystem.

A UAE hosted event may be subject to rights held at league, federation, group or international level. The local organiser may have the right to stage the event, but the commercial rights associated with the wider competition may belong to another entity, potentially outside the UAE.

The Abu Dhabi Grand Prix is an obvious illustration. The local event sits within the wider Formula One Group, with the commercial rights held by Formula One Management; the fact that a race takes place in Abu Dhabi does not mean the UAE event organiser Abu Dhabi Motorsports Management owns all intellectual property, broadcast, sponsorship or commercial rights associated with the race event in Abu Dhabi.

A similar issue arises in domestic sport. The UAE Pro League's marketing regulations illustrate how rights can be allocated between a league and its clubs, with competition broadcast and marketing rights sitting alongside separate club and player-related commercial interests.

For UAE event organisers, legal due diligence may therefore need to extend beyond the immediate contracting parties. The organiser should establish what rights it has received from the relevant international or domestic rights holders and whether those rights can be sublicensed to sponsors, broadcasters, suppliers or other commercial partners in the UAE.

Intellectual property is only part of the answer

It is tempting to approach event rights as purely an intellectual property exercise. IP is important, but it is only one layer.

Copyright and neighbouring rights can attach to music, performances, broadcasts, recordings, photographs and other creative material. A performer may have rights in their performance; a production company may have rights in content it creates; a broadcaster may receive a limited media licence; and an organiser may have contractual rights to exploit the event itself. These rights must be carefully distinguished from ownership.

A contract giving an organiser the right to use a recording for the duration of an event is not an assignment of ownership of that recording. Equally, a sponsor's right to use the event logo does not give the sponsor ownership of the trademark. The distinction between ownership, assignment, exclusive licensing and non-exclusive licensing should be explicit in event agreements.

Controlling and protecting commercial rights

Historically, organisers could exert relatively tight control over event content through appointed broadcasters, photographers and accredited media. Today, virtually every attendee carries a high-quality camera and recording device and can record a performance, post it to social media, livestream it, create a compilation, use it to promote another business or monetise the resulting content.

This is particularly acute for sponsors. A sponsor that has paid for exclusive content rights may find large volumes of unofficial event content circulating online within minutes. Where a sponsor pays for exclusivity or official association, the value of that right depends on the organiser being able to control the surrounding commercial ecosystem sufficiently to protect it.

This does not mean an organiser automatically owns every image or video captured by an attendee, nor that an attendee has unrestricted rights to commercially exploit what they record. The position involves a combination of IP rights, contractual conditions of entry, participant rights, trademarks, sponsorship rights and other applicable laws.

The commercial rights architecture therefore needs to anticipate content leakage as well as conventional infringement and contracts need to be specific as to what rights an event organiser can protect and how.

The importance of a commercial rights map

Conducting a commercial rights mapping exercise at the outset of event planning is critical. Engaging legal counsel in this process can mitigate financial and reputational risk if it later transpires that commercial rights were drafted too broadly and overlap with rights of others.

The relevant question is not simply whether the organiser has the “commercial rights” to an event, but which rights have been acquired, from whom, for what purpose, in which territory, for how long, and whether any additional regulatory or collective-management licence is required. A well conducted rights mapping exercise will address these details, define categories and layers of rights and align them to the applicable regulatory framework.

Commercial rights mapping should not be restricted to only large events. A corporate conference may involve a venue, title sponsor, technology sponsor, catering partner, speaker, production company and streaming provider. A music festival may involve artists, promoters, venues, ticketing platforms, broadcasters and sponsors. The scale changes; the principle does not.

Even for a smaller event with one organiser and a handful of commercial partners, it remains important to define who owns the event name, who can use event photographs and recordings, who can sell merchandise, who can exploit attendee data and what rights sponsors receive.

Whether small or larger scale, legal counsel can add significant value before the event contracts are signed. A practical rights map should identify, for each material commercial right:

Mapping can be undertaken in a diligence format asking questions such as:

The purpose is not to create unnecessary contractual complexity. It is to make sure that the contractual rights granted correspond precisely with the rights that the contracting party actually owns or controls.

Conclusion: the value is in getting the boundaries right

The commercial value of an event increasingly lies in the rights surrounding it: sponsorship, media, digital content, ticketing, hospitality, merchandising, branding and association. Those rights may be owned by different entities, licensed in different ways, restricted by existing agreements and, in the UAE, subject to federal legislation and emirate-level regulatory requirements.

The most expensive mistakes often occur not because an organiser has failed to obtain a right at all, but because it has assumed its right is broader than it actually is. A sponsor may believe it has exclusivity when it has only category-specific rights. A broadcaster may believe it has all digital content when its licence covers only live transmission. An organiser may believe it owns an event name when use of a place name requires governmental approval. A UAE entity may believe it controls a commercial right which is, in fact, held by an international group, federation or league.

These are precisely the issues that careful legal advice should identify before contracts are signed. A commercial rights mapping exercise is the essential first step, and it must be closely followed by meticulous drafting.

A well-drafted event contract should do more than record a commercial agreement. It should establish, with precision, which rights exist, who controls them, what has already been granted, what is being granted and what is expressly excluded.

For event organisers and commercial partners alike, that clarity can be the difference between a right that is commercially valuable and a right that exists only on paper and is a recipe for a dispute.

If you are organising, delivering or hosting an event in the UAE, Shonagh MacVicar, Senior Counsel, Commercial (s.macvicar@hadefpartners.com) can advise on commercial rights mapping and the drafting of commercial rights contracts to mitigate the financial and reputational risks of commercial rights overlap or conflicts.

This article is intended for general informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. Readers should seek independent legal counsel in relation to their specific circumstances.