Decision clarifies who counts as principal director and when moral rights survive
A film director has won a landmark Federal Court ruling on 27 February 2026, affirming his moral rights over a documentary stripped of his credit.
In McCallum v Projector Films Pty Ltd, Justice Shariff of the Federal Court of Australia found that director Stephen McCallum was the sole principal director of Never Get Busted!, a documentary following the life of Barry Cooper, a former Texan-based narcotics officer who became a drug reform campaigner.
The film screened at the Sundance Film Festival and had its Australian premiere at the Melbourne International Film Festival, with potential offers from streaming services awaiting.
Projector Films, the production company behind the documentary, failed to give McCallum the contractually agreed credit "Directed by Stephen McCallum" in any screened version of the film. Instead, the credits positioned David Ngo, producer, principal writer, and co-founder of Projector Films, as the primary director.
The court found this constituted both a breach of contract and an infringement of McCallum's moral rights under the Copyright Act 1968 (Cth). The court also found that Projector Films engaged in misleading and deceptive conduct under s 18 of the Australian Consumer Law, through false directorship representations made on IMDb, in Sundance promotional and screening materials, and in the first of the representations made at the Melbourne International Film Festival.
The director's agreement between McCallum and Projector Films contained clause 6.2, which Projector Films argued operated as a general waiver of all of McCallum's moral rights. Justice Shariff held that the text, context, and purpose of Part IX of the Copyright Act do not support a general waiver of moral rights, and that clause 6.2 was unenforceable to the extent it purported to operate as one. The Court also found the clause did not constitute a valid consent to the specific infringements McCallum alleged. This ruling resolved, for the first time under Australian law, whether a blanket contractual waiver of moral rights can stand.
Central to the dispute was the question of what it meant to be a "principal director" under the Copyright Act. Where two or more individuals are involved in directing a film, only the principal director holds moral rights of attribution, not any subsidiary director. The court found that McCallum, engaged under successive agreements from February 2020 and with responsibility for directing the documentary throughout production, was the sole principal director. Ngo, while recognised by the Court as a director of the documentary, did not meet the threshold of principal director.
Projector Films also lost most of its cross-claims. The court found McCallum did not fail to discharge his duties as director and rejected allegations that he engaged in misleading conduct, save for one limited finding that he brought notoriety to Projector Films. The matter then proceeded to a separate hearing on relief, remedies, and costs.
