At 7:55 AM -0500 12/6/06, dhbailey wrote:
Noel Stoutenburg wrote:
[snip]
By abandoned copyrights, I do not mean the situation where the
copyright owner explicitly placed a work in the public domain. I
use the term in your second sense: there is a copyright, but there
is no owner to be found to enforce it.
I'm not convinced this is true -- if XYZ is the copyright owner of
record in the U.S. Copyright Office, then nobody else can claim
copyright in that work.
Lots of opinions being thrown around here, and NONE of us has seen
the inside of a law school, but this brings up a concrete question.
When a copyright is assigned (and i believe that is the correct term,
not bought or sold), is it (a) customary, (b) required, or (c)
commonly done to so inform the copyright office, to apply for a new
copyright, or otherwise to change the original copyright application
and registration? I supposed it's possible, but I've never seen
anything written that covers this.
It would take an expensive copyright attorney to try to bring suit
against the U.S. Copyright Office on behalf of the composer to force
the record to be changed to show that XYZ is no longer the copyright
owner and that Great Composer is the rightful copyright owner.
But ... [see above!]
There currently is no provision in the law to revert the copyright
to Great Composer, if XYZ corporation ceases to exist and the assets
are not transferred to another entity.
We can agree on that. It is entirely a contractual matter, and
depends on whether that contingency was covered in the assignment
contract.
I don't believe anyone has stated this explicitly, so I'll go out on
a limb. Copyright in the U.S. is treated as a property right, and a
copyrighted work is treated as property. In fact, property and
property rights were extremely important to the founding fathers.
Only property owners had the right to vote, and even the laws
governing the holding of slaves treated the slaves as property and
protected the slave owner's property rights in those slaves. I
believe that indentured servitude was treated in the same way,
although for a specific period of time rather than in perpetuity.
All of this is VERY different from the way various European,
Mediterranean, African or Asian cultures treated slavery--AND
copyright.
As property, copyrights (or specific sub-rights) may be bought, sold,
assigned (with or without a time limit), rented, or treated as any
other transaction involving the ownership of property and the
transfer of that ownership. I have the impression from our
colleagues in Germany that the right of ownership there can NEVER be
terminated. Is that close to the mark?
John
--
John & Susie Howell
Virginia Tech Department of Music
Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S.A 24061-0240
Vox (540) 231-8411 Fax (540) 231-5034
(mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED])
http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/howell/howell.html
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