copyright interests in a work for a comparatively small sum and did not share in the resulting profits when the work later proved to be commercially valuable. In the years leading up to the passage of the Copyright Act of 1976, remedying these unremunerative transfers was identified as an important congressional objective. The 1961 Report of the Register of Copyrights, which proposed comprehensive copyright revision, noted that “authors are often in a relatively poor bargaining position” as compared with publishers and suggested that Congress should “permit them to renegotiate their transfers that do not give them a reasonable share of the economic returns from their works.”[1] The Register singled out, as particularly problematic, transfers of authors’ rights in exchange for a one-time lump sum payment—just the sort of agreement Siegel and Shuster had made.[2] To better protect authors, the Register proposed that all transfers or assignments of copyright not requiring continuing royalty payments should terminate automatically, by operation of law, twenty years after they were made.[3] When that proposal encountered opposition, the Register proposed instead that authors be empowered (but not required) to terminate licenses or transfers of their rights after a fixed period of time.[4] Congress accepted this alternative proposal, and it became part of the Copyright Act of 1976.[5]
- ↑ Staff of H.R. Comm. on the Judiciary, 87th Cong., Register’s Report on the General Revision of the U.S. Copyright Law 92 (Comm. Print 1961) [hereinafter Register’s Report]. The Register recognized that one mechanism aimed at providing such an opportunity for renegotiation—to wit, the grant of a separate renewal term of copyright to the author at the expiration of the initial twenty-eight-year term of protection—already existed under the 1909 Act. See id. at 53–54; see also supra note 166 (summarizing dual-term framework). The reversion of renewal term rights, however, had failed adequately to protect authors against the risk of unremunerative transfers, due in part to court decisions upholding authors’ assignments of renewal-term rights made during the initial twenty-eight-year term of the copyright. See, e.g., Fred Fisher Music Co. v. M . Witmark & Sons, 318 U.S. 643 (1943). If authors could validly contract away their renewal term rights at a time when their bargaining power was thought to be weakest, then the separate renewal estate provided no real benefit. As the Register observed: “It has become a common practice for publishers and others to take advance assignments of future renewal rights. Thus the reversionary purpose of the renewal provision has been thwarted to a considerable extent.” Register’s Report, supra, at 53. Although later court decisions recognized that the renewal term rights would revert to the author’s estate, free and clear of any assignments or encumbrances made during the first term if the author died before the vesting of the renewal term rights, those cases did nothing to reduce the risk of unremunerative transfers where the author survived long enough for the renewal term rights (and hence, the prior assignment of those rights to the publisher) to vest. See Stewart v. Abend, 495 U.S. 207 (1990); Miller Music Corp. v. Charles N. Daniels, Inc., 362 U.S. 373 (1960). See generally Stephen W. Tropp, It Had to be Murder or Will Be Soon—17 U.S.C. § 203 Termination of Transfers: A Call for Legislative Reform, 51 J. Copyright Soc’y U.S.A. 797, 804–06 (2004) (recounting some of this history).
- ↑ See supra notes 217–18 and accompanying text; Register’s Report, supra note 236, at 93 (“The situation in which authors are most likely to receive less than a fair share of the economic value of their works is that of an outright transfer for a lump sum.”).
- ↑ Register’s Report, supra note 236, at 93–94.
- ↑ Staff of H.R. Comm. on the Judiciary, 89th Cong., Supplementary Register’s Report on the General Revision of the U.S. Copyright Law 71–76 (Comm. Print 1965); Tropp, supra note 242, at 805–07.
- ↑ Pub. L. No. 94-553, 90 Stat. 2541 (1976) (codified at scattered sections of 17 U.S.C.).
