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Stayin' Alive: An Overview of Copyright Termination

BY James A. Trigg
April 29, 2010

Remember Heart, Donna Summer and KC and the Sunshine Band? The ubiquitous artists of the 1970s could soon champion a fundamental shift in ownership
of previously granted copyright interests, thus impacting the recording business and other content industries. The year 2013 will mark the first year that authors can take advantage of the Copyright Act's ' 203 termination provision, likely setting off a flood of termination notices by artists seeking to regain rights previously granted to record labels, book publishers, advertising agencies, and other content owners. This newly effective right, particularly when combined with the increasing number of works subject to termination under the Act, will soon bring to the legal forefront the complex and until now largely ignored termination provisions of the Copyright Act.

Overview

When it enacted the 1976 Copyright Act, Congress fashioned a new property right: the right of authors and their statutory successors to recapture ownership and control of copyrights by terminating past assignments or licenses following a statutorily specified duration of time. Congress's primary goal in enacting these provisions was to allow an author to reclaim financial benefits arising from the copyrighted work after the passage of time allowed the true value of the work to be determined, for which the author might not have been adequately compensated at the time of the original transfer. The termination provisions, found in ” 304(c) and 203 of the Copyright Act, are similar but not identical, and are distinguished by the date of the transfer or license.

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