The Copyright Act gives a great deal of power to the original creators of works. For works created after 1977, the original author of a work can terminate any grant of rights roughly between 35 and 40 years after the date of the grant and provided that at least two years’ notice of the...
Read more →Copyright ownership claims are not unusual. But what about authorship? Often the distinction doesn’t matter because, in infringement claims, the owner stands in the shoes of author. But it does matter to termination – the author (or the author’s heirs) is the only one with termination rights; a mere owner cannot exercise a termination...
Read more →This is a remarkable story. It’s a counter-intuitive result, not wrong, but so surprising. I present: THE VILLAGE PEOPLE!! (Go ahead, full screen. You know you want to.) There is no dispute that the plaintiff in this case, Can’t Stop Productions, Inc., created the Village People. The front man in the video, the police...
Read more →The Copyright Act allows for the termination of any copyright grants given. There are different statutory provisions for it* depending on the date of the original grant (before or after January 1, 1978), whether the author is still alive, and with somewhat different conditions for termination, but they can all be terminated. When the...
Read more →I mean, I hate to write about it. It’s convoluted, tedious, and the cases don’t generally tell the good juicy stories that I like so much. Luckily for all of us though, there is someone who loves to write about copyright termination, Dave Fagundes. He has a blog devoted to the topic and it’s...
Read more →The Vanity Fair issue has been out for awhile now, but for anyone interested in Harper Lee, “To Kill a Mockingbird,” John Steinbeck, publishing, legal intrigue, contracts, copyright termination, or underhanded dealing, there is a lengthy investigative article in the August issue called “To Steal a Mockingbird.” It is the story behind a lawsuit...
Read more →When we last visited Scorpio Music v. Willis, Victor Willis, one of the Village People, was successful in dismissing a suit filed by Scorpio Music, his former music publisher. Scorpio Music claimed Willis couldn’t terminate his copyright grant without his co-authors. In the decision we learned he could and the suit was dismissed, effectively terminating Willis...
Read more →The first decision on a termination of a copyright grant under Section 203 of the Copyright Act is out of the gate. It’s a bit of a no-brainer though; in fact, the case was decided on a motion to dismiss. Victor Willis was one of the “Village People,” but more importantly he was one...
Read more →Ray Charles was either an employee and wrote and performed music in the scope of his employment, or exercised his termination right to his songs in 1980 in settlement of a suit against his publisher, or alternatively the settlement was an assignment of the songs. Shortly before his death in 2004, he granted his...
Read more →I’ve carefully avoided blogging about copyright termination rights, but only because the cases are so mind-numbing. Luckily, though, Tamera Bennett at the Create Protect Blog isn’t afraid to take the subject on. She’s summarized the 2009 and 2010 Cases of Interest. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United...
Read more →Attorney Advertising. Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome.
© 2013-2022 Pamela S. Chestek. All rights reserved.