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The Interaction of International Law and U.S. Copyright–Assignment Terminations
That U.S. copyright-assignment termination issues are among the most complex in the copyright field becomes even more apparent when attempts to reclaim copyrights involve aspects of international law. Few courts have ruled, however, on the impact of international law on U.S. copyright-assignment terminations. The most recent to do so is the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in Ennio Morricone Music Inc. v. Bixio Music Group Ltd., 17-3595 (2d Cir. 2019).
Ennio Morricone is an Academy Award-winning Italian composer who garnered international fame in the 1960s for his scoring work on Italian director Sergio Leone's "spaghetti westerns." Toward the end of the 1970s and in the early 1980s, Morricone entered into agreements with Italian publisher Bixio Music for Morricone to create movie scores that Bixo then placed with Italian filmmakers needing music. In the composer agreements, Morricone granted Bixio "exclusively, for the maximum total duration permitted by the laws in force in each country in the world, and at the conditions established here below, all the rights of economic use, in any country in the world, with regard to the works." The agreements also stated the music Morricone created "shall forever continue to be the absolute and exclusive property of" Bixio.
In 2012, Morricone Music sent Bixio termination notices to recapture the musical scores' U.S. copyright interests under 17 U.S.C. §203, which allows authors to do so for post-1977 works starting 35 years after a copyright grant is made — except for "works for hire," which provide no reversion rights. In 2016, Morricone Music filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York for a declaratory ruling that the termination notices were valid. Bixo responded that Morricone's scores had been composed as works for hire.
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