Supreme Court rejects music labels' challenge to copyright termination

gamblor956

While this rejection at first seems cataclysmic (contradicts the Berne Convention and all that), U.S. record labels started requiring musicians to agree to work-for-hire contracts decades ago to avoid this situation, so as a practical matter only a few dozen old songwriters can take advantage of this, and only a handful of those songs were worth licensing. The end result will simply be that the non-US rights to songs covered by the lower-court rulings will become unlicensable or nearly worthless because nobody will pay for rights that can be revoked at any time for any reason. This actually happened soon after the initial district court ruling. Several studios backed out of using his song in their shows since they couldn't acquire determinable worldwide rights for shows. He won the battle but lost the war.