Copyright renewal

“ When an author produces a work which later commands a higher price in the market than the original bargain provided, the copyright statute is designed to provide the author the power to negotiate for the realized value of the work. That is how the separate renewal term was intended to operate. ”

“ Each Plaintiff provides, or intends to provide, access to works that allegedly have little or no commercial value but remain under copyright protection. The difficulty and expense of obtaining permission to place those works on the Internet is overwhelming; ownership of these “orphan” works is often difficult, and sometimes impossible, to ascertain.
Prior to 1978, the number of orphaned works was limited by the renewal requirement. Renewal served as a filter that passed certain works — mostly those without commercial value — into the public domain. ”

“ No case is likely to arise for twenty-eight years from the time of first copyright, under the act, of an unpublished work; but the dilemma will then present itself to the author whether he should apply for a renewal term and thus accept the limitations of the statute, or rely upon the original registration as a protection in perpetuity up to the time of publication. ”

“ That statute limits the renewal rights in a copyright to the specified statutory beneficiaries, "completely dissevering the title, breaking up the continuance . . . and vesting an absolutely new title eo nomine in the persons designated." ”

“ The CC0 license’s Statement of Purpose, which lacks any parallel in the Public Domain Dedication, may supply a useful interpretive guide to courts or other authorities called upon to construe the license insofar as it explicates and justifies the author’s conscious determination to forgo proprietary rewards in favor of building the commons. For lawyers and policymakers steeped in copyright’s historically dominant proprietary-production paradigm, this concise introduction to the open-content movement’s alternative worldview may be highly valuable. ”

“ Although a number of judge-made doctrines may be invoked to restrict termination of a license granted for the benefit of the public, the better course would be for Congress to enact new legislation expressly authorizing authors to make a nonwaiveable, irrevocable dedication of their works, in whole or in part, to the use and benefit of the public—a possibility that the Patent Act expressly recognizes, but the Copyright Act presently does not. ”

“ Abandonment by License Perhaps influenced by highly restrictive judicial interpretations of the copyright abandonment doctrine, open-content advocates have sought to facilitate the growth of an expressive commons by drafting what are, in essence, copyright abandonment licenses—instruments that seek to express, with maximum clarity, an author’s attempt to abandon copyright and dedicate a work to the public domain. ”

“ Existing U.S. law, however, may not comfortably accommodate a transfer “to the detriment of Affirmer’s heirs and successors” that “shall not be subject to . . . termination,” [227] nor an “irrevocable . . . license [.] ” [228] Such provisions may run afoul of the termination rights the Copyright Act confers upon the authors of expressive works, which cannot be waived or contracted away. [229]
Existing law, in sum, poses a number of obstacles to the growth of the public domain as a commons of freely reusable expressive works. ”

“ Copyrights were created to benefit society by encouraging acts of creation, development and spreading cultural expressions. To achieve these goals, we need a delicate balance between common demands of availability and distribution on one hand, and the demands of the creator to be recognized and remunerated on the other. We claim that today's copyright system is way out of balance. A society where cultural expressions and knowledge is free for all on equal terms would benefit the whole of the society. ”

“ If an application for a work is received after its renewal period has expired, and a renewal claim has already been registered in the name of another claimant, the Copyright Office will correspond and point out that it is too late for the registration of this renewal claim, but that registration has been made in the name of another claimant. ”

“ When the author is dead and there is more than one person in the class of beneficiaries entitled to renew under the statute, registration by one claimant secures renewal for all those who would have been entitled to claim. ”

“ Second, making works available for use under open-content licenses has a multiplier effect, permitting the creation of new works which may never have come into existence absent the raw materials that the licenses place into the commons. ”

“ Several of the routes by which expressive works once entered the public domain have been curtailed or eliminated; indeed, the only circumstance the Copyright Act presently expressly recognizes as ending protection under copyright for U.S. works is through the expiration of the statutory term of protection. [230] The strong statutory presumption of continual proprietary protection influences other copyright policymakers, too; the courts, for their part, are exceedingly unlikely to find that an author has abandoned the rights vested automatically by statute from the moment of fixation. ”

“ Open-content licenses preserve a commons of informational works because it is well settled (as Jacobsen illustrates) that the author of a work may attach enforceable conditions to authorized uses of the work. [301] There is no comparably settled doctrine, however, in favor of the making of a permanent and non-terminable license of rights under copyright. The statute, to the contrary, expressly circumscribes private action to create a non-terminable license. ”

“ The evolution of these provisions in the legislation that ultimately became the Copyright Act of 1976, and the pattern of case law construing those provisions, both show that Congress’s attention was focused on redressing unremunerative transfers made by authors in the face of superior bargaining power: [24] a policy that, whatever its normative appeal, clearly has no application to the peer-production phenomenon. The need to address the termination issue draws added force from recent cases applying traditional copyright principles to open-content licenses. ”

“ When copyright rights attach automatically upon fixation and formalities are irrelevant, it is quite possible that a court may construe an author’s post-fixation dedication of the work to the public domain as a “nonexclusive grant of a transfer or license or copyright or of any right under a copyright” [306] that is necessarily subject to the statute’s termination provisions. This interpretation would allow the author to terminate her abandonment of copyright and recapture proprietary rights in the work. ”

“ An author’s voluntary selection of an open-content license cannot plausibly be analogized to a transaction in which a powerful licensee pressures an author into an unremunerative exchange. The Copyright Act’s termination provisions were enacted to strengthen authors’ resistance to such pressures, and courts may rightly question why the statute should be applied in circumstances, such as open-content licensing, where these pressures are manifestly absent. ”

“ Congress should recognize the peer production phenomenon as an essential change in the baseline assumptions that prevailed at the time of the Copyright Act of 1976—a change that demands its own recognition in positive law. ”

“ When this situation is presented the Copyright Office will register a claim as "proprietor of copyright in a work made for hire," but will point the difficulty out to the applicant.
IV.
More than one author. When more than one author contributed to a work, the renewal claimant need not specify that all of the authors were employed for hire. ”

“ We as a society give limited property rights to creators to encourage them to produce science and culture; at the same time, we guarantee that all works eventually will become part of the public domain and, in the meantime, we give other creators and speakers the opportunity to use copyrighted material without permission or payment in some circumstances. ”

“ Every delegation of rulemaking authority presents some risk of regulatory capture, and it is possible, albeit unlikely, that the Librarian’s power might be subject to abuse. For example, suppose the Librarian interceded on behalf of a powerful movie studio to declare non-terminable a license, like Siegel and Shuster’s, upon which the studio had built a lucrative franchise. [380] The amended statute’s reference to licenses that “grant copyright rights to the public at large” ought to ensure that such a misapplication of the agency’s power does not survive judicial review. ”

“ This means that if you research a copyright question, you need only use federal sources of law such as the United States Code and decisions from federal courts.
Copyright does not place an author’s work in a lockbox. The primary purpose of copyright is not to compensate creators. The U.S. Supreme Court has stated, many times, that copyright is a means to a greater societal end: the dissemination and promotion of knowledge. [10] As librarians, we promote the dissemination of knowledge. ”

“ Well, copyright law and fair-use takes into account the notion of market harm, that one of the factors that a court would look at in determining whether a use is a fair one, is the harm to the market for the original work. ”

“ If a work is "posthumous" within the meaning of the copyright law, the proprietor is the proper renewal claimant. Generally, the author's widow, widower, children, executor, or next of kin have no right to claim renewal in a "posthumous work."
1317.03 (a)
Definition. A work is not considered "posthumous" if it is published during the author's lifetime: but a work is commonly considered "posthumous" if it is first published after the author's death. ”

“ No right of eminent domain in respect to copyrights is asserted by the United States, and the provision means only that material, otherwise copyrightable, furnished by a public officer or otherwise to the Government, becoming the property of the Government, is put freely at the service of the people. ”

“ Courts are more likely to find an infringement when the copyright owner incurs financial harm due to unauthorized or uncompensated copying. In 1985, the Supreme Court called the fourth factor the most important element of fair use. ”

“ During the copyright term, the public pays the rightsholder a fee to reuse the work. The idea is that these economic benefits will incentivise creators to make new creative works, over which they will enjoy a limited monopoly from which they may profit and exert control. ”

“ It would align the law with the reasonable expectations of authors (numbering in the millions in the United States alone) who write open-source software, contribute photos to Flickr, add content to Wikipedia or its sister sites, build architectural edifices in Second Life, or write weblogs, all while expecting and intending that their contributions will forever remain available for others to enjoy. ”

“ Individual contributions. While the proprietor of a composite work may claim renewal in the work as a whole, the author of an individual contribution, or the author's beneficiaries, may also claim renewal in the contribution. ”

“ If the author dies leaving a will, and if no widow, widower, or children are living at the time the renewal appli­cation is filed, the author's executor is entitled to claim renewal in his or her own name. ”

“ Creating a commons of freely reusable works can be accomplished only with licenses that constrain the commons-defeating features of current law. The default positions of copyright law tend to reflect assumptions that emphasize individual production under a strongly proprietary regime. ”

“ C What copyright-related benefits might justify the statute’s extension of copyright protection? First, no one could reasonably conclude that copyright’s traditional economic rationale applies here. The extension will not act as an economic spur encouraging authors to create new works. See Mazer, 347 U.S., at 219 (The “economic philosophy” of the Copyright Clause is to “advance public welfare” by “encourag [ing] individual effort” through “personal gain”) ; see also ante, at 212, n.18 (“ [C] opyright law serves public ends by providing individuals with an incentive to pursue private ones”) . ”

“ Then again, the new law provides that no phonograph company or any makers of musical instruments, as well as makers of self-playing pianos, can deliberately use the work of the brain of the composer as well as the property of the publisher without permission to do so or paying some remuneration for the same.
Imagine the injustice of the thing. A composer writes a song or an opera. A publisher buys at great expense the rights to the same and copyrights it. ”

“ The sole interest of the United States and the primary object in conferring the monopoly lie in the general benefits derived by the public from the labors of authors. A copyright, like a patent, is 'at once the equivalent given by the public for benefits bestowed by the genius and meditations and skill of individuals, and the incentive to further efforts for the same important objects.' Kendall v. ”

“ The termination provisions of the Copyright Act, however, make every FOSS contributor another potential SCO: contributors may revoke permission, years after the fact, to copy and reuse their contributions, thereby potentially requiring significant re-engineering of open-content projects. ”

“ The BSD license says: “Here is a commons. It is not defended by copyright against appropriation. Everything in the commons may be taken and put into proprietary, non-commons production as easily as it may be incorporated in commons production. We encourage people to put material into commons, and we are indifferent as to whether the appropriative use made of commons resources is proprietary, or commons-reinforcing.” ”