Fake news. That is my
characterization of most news stories that report on entertainment and
copyright litigation. Witness the
reporting of Paul McCartney's recent lawsuit against music publisher Sony/ATV. It was reported that McCartney had sued
Sony/ATV to recover the copyrights to his Beatles era compensations.
Paul
McCartney did not need to sue anyone to recover his U.S. copyrights. Section 304(c) of the Copyright Act
gives McCartney the right to terminate the assignment of these copyrights after
(a mere) 56 years (these songs were all created prior to January 1,
1978; there is a different section that applies to post 1978 copyrights).
The story
of how Sony/ATV ended up with these copyrights to most of the Lennon/McCartney
catalog has been detailed elsewhere. Beginning in October 2008, McCartney began
serving termination notices on Sony/ATV and according to the complaint, the
terminations will begin vesting in October 2018. Sony has acknowledged that these terminations
are valid. The purpose of McCartney's
lawsuit is to seek a declaratory judgment that not only are the terminations
valid but that the terminations themselves do not give rise to a breach of
contract claim against McCartney by the publisher.
This may
seem somewhat odd since it is well settled that the Copyright Act gives authors
the right to terminate assignments of copyright despite any prior agreement to
the contrary. The problem is that this
is U.S. law. There is no corresponding
British law. Last year, when the member
of the band Duran Duran attempted to terminate the U.S. assignment of copyright
to their works, Sony's affiliate in the United Kingdom sued the band for breach
of contract. The court in that case
ruled in favor of Sony/ATV. This sounds
crazy but the court found that Duran Duran did not present expert evidence of
U.S. law so the British court did not take U.S. law into consideration. It seems as if the Duran Duran decision
should ultimately be remedied but if it is not, this does put songwriters like
McCartney in an untenable position. How
can they exercise their statutory rights in one country only to be sued for
breach of contract in another country?
For this reason, McCartney may be taking a stand for similarly situated
creators ( i.e. British songwriters who signed UK publishing deals and had
success in America) asking the U.S. court to rule that the exercise of his
termination rights does not represent a breach of his publishing agreement
and/or that the agreements cannot be enforced against him to the extent that
they interfere with the exercise of his termination rights. The unspoken third claim of this declaratory
judgment is most likely: take that
Michael Jackson.
