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Entertainment Law & FinanceFeaturesCopyrightsEntertainment and Sports Law

'To Kill a Mockingbird''s State Adaptation Rights Results In Ambiguity Battle

By Stan Soocher
July 01, 2022

If more than one derivative-use agreement is entered into for the exploitation of rights in the underlying work, a key goal of contract drafters and negotiators is to specify and distinguish the rights being granted to each of the different parties in their agreements. A major consideration, of course, is to avoid disputes from an overlap of rights granted. A current dispute over contract language in grants to different parties for theatrical adaptations of the classic 1960 novel To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee is an apt example of what can happen if contract language isn't specific enough, in this case resulting in an arbitrator inserting the term "non-first-class rights" into an award decision and leading Lee's estate to claim the arbitrator's use of the term was ambiguous.

In a 1969 agreement, Lee gave the Illinois-based Dramatic Publishing the "complete right throughout the world … [t]o lease the amateur acting rights in and to" her novel, while reserving "all rights not expressly granted to [Dramatic], including but not limited to the professional acting … rights." But in 2011, Lee informed Dramatic she was terminating the license grant under 17 U.S.C. §304(c), the rights recapture provision of the U.S. Copyright Act for pre-1978 works.

Meanwhile, in 2015 Lee granted Scott Rudin's production company, Rudinplay, an option for the stage rights to To Kill a Mockingbird for $100,000, "subject to the rights granted under the [Dramatic Publishing agreement], as limited by [Lee's] termination." (17 U.S.C. §304(c)(6)(A) allows "a derivative work prepared under authority of the grant [of a license] before its termination [to] continue to be utilized under the terms of the grant after its termination.")

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