Hot Topics in IP: Copyright Termination

Copyright termination disputes are popping up everywhere these days. What is “copyright termination,” anyway? It’s actually shorthand for the termination of the assignment of a copyright. As Eric Osterberg of Fox Rothschild explains:

In extremely bold strokes, [the termination provisions of the Copyright Act permit] authors of works, or their heirs, to terminate any transfer or exclusive license within certain time periods after the date of the grant. To terminate, an author or his heirs needs to give a prescribed form of written notice to the grantee within a certain window of time. Affected parties may dispute the timing and sufficiency of the termination notice, as well as whether the work at issue is eligible for termination.

Several recent high-profile copyright termination suits have involved attempts by heirs of the creators of comic book characters to terminate the assignments of those rights to entertainment industry behemoths like Warner Brothers.

In fact, after losing a termination lawsuit to the heirs of Superman co-creators Jerome Siegel and Joseph Shuster, who in the fall of 2009 won back certain extremely valuable rights related to the Man of Steel, Warners filed a new lawsuit alleging in part that the Siegel/Shuster parties’ attorney and business partner, Marc Toberoff, unlawfully induced the Siegel/Shuster parties to repudiate their existing deals with Warners subsidiary DC Comics in order to set the stage for the suit against Warners.

Losing litigants don’t often sue the winners’ attorneys; it’s safe to say that Warners is taking the loss a bit personally. As THR, Esq., puts it, the suit is “clearly designed to discredit as much as disarm a lawyer who often seems to stand in [Warners's] way,” since Toberoff has a history of tangling with Warners on copyright issues and has beaten them soundly in the past. The complaint is available here.

If you’d like to know more, UCLA and some partners in private enterprise have launched a great new site called IP Colloquium which presents webcasts of discussions about IP law, and its June 2010 program, featuring copyright expert David Nimmer, is entitled “Copyright Termination.” Lawyers in California and several other states can even get CLE credit for listening to IP Colloquium lectures.

Some bonus links:

Musicians Starting to Assert Copyright Termination Rights Against Record Labels.

A Copyright Grant Termination Calculator.