Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
June Besek
June Besek is the executive director of the Kernochan Center for Law,
Media and the Arts and a lecturer in law at Columbia Law School in
New York City, where she teaches “Current Issues in Copyright” and
a seminar that focuses on the rights of individual authors and artists.
Previously she was a partner in a New York City law firm where she
specialized in copyright law. She is a former chair of the Copyright
Division of the American Bar Association's Intellectual Property Law
Section. She is a frequent speaker on copyright issues and the author
of many articles on copyright law, particularly as it relates to new
technologies.
I read that Bob Dylan, Charlie Daniels, Loretta Lynn, Don Henley from the Eagles, and
other recording artists have notified the US Copyright Office that they intend to exercise
their termination rights and recover the copyrights to their music. What are termination
rights?
Section 203 of the Copyright Act gives authors or their heirs the right to terminate any grant of
copyrights like a license or assignment 35 years after the grant was made. That particular termination
right applies only to grants made by the author on or after January 1, 1978. When I say “authors,” I
mean any kind of creators: book authors, composers, sound-recording artists, and so on. The effect of
termination is that all of the rights that were transferred or licensed under the grant revert back to the
authors or their heirs.
Why do we have termination rights?
The point of termination is that authors and artists often have very little bargaining power when
they negotiate contracts, and frequently neither the author nor the publisher has any realistic idea of
how popular or how lucrative their work might become. So this termination provision lets an author
renegotiate the agreement or even take the work to a new publisher and maybe get more money or
perhaps more control over how the work is marketed.
Why is this specifically an issue in the sound-recording context?
Federal copyright law didn't protect sound recordings until 1972, and then there was a major revision
of the copyright law that went into effect six years later. A lot of the recordings created under the
old law were done as “works made for hire,” and therefore under the law the grants weren't eligible
for termination. The work-made-for-hire rules were changed in 1978, but there haven't yet been any
terminations under the revised copyright law, so the effect of the revised work-made-for-hire rules on
artists' ability to terminate is uncertain. That's why this is a new issue.
Must recording artists give notice to reclaim ownership?
Yes, in order to reclaim their rights they have to give notice. If you signed a grant the first day of the
new Copyright Act, January 1, 1978, the earliest you could terminate would be January 1, 2013. In
order to terminate, you have to serve a notice on the party whose grant you're terminating, and you
have to file it in the Copyright Office. That notice can be served anywhere from ten years out to two
years out. So if you wanted to terminate at the beginning of 2013, you could have served that notice as
early as the beginning of 2003 and as late as the beginning of 2011. But there's a five-year window for
