Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956
Little-known aspect of US copyright law means creators can reclaim their work
The Hollywood Reporter recently ran an article by Eriq Gardner entitled "Real-Life 'Terminator': Major Studios Face Sweeping Loss of Iconic '80s Film Franchise Rights," which is certainly an attention-demanding headline. Some of the franchise properties referred to in Gardner's piece are worth – without exaggeration – billions of dollars to the studios.
Money, in copyright-land, has the attribute of making things happen. Long story short, the creators of the original works underlying these now-classic films are making use of a relatively little-known (and little understood) aspect of US copyright law, known as "termination of transfers." Through this, creators can reclaim their rights from the studios to whom they sold them long ago (and perhaps sell them again, either to the same studios or to someone else).
Before we dive deeper into those particular film instances, we should back up a bit and look at the larger context of the two termination sections of Title 17 of the U.S. Code (comprising the US copyright statute) and what Congress had in mind when they inserted them.
There's no way, in a brief blog post, to substitute for a full study of this topic, but I'll provide a few helpful links along the way for readers who may wish to wade into the deeper end of this pool.
(Score: 2) by GDX on Monday November 11 2019, @12:42PM
Trying to revoke the GPL is really difficult as normally in a project there is not only a lone developer but a bunch of them, most of the time at best the developer can retract the license for it's code or change it even if he is the founder.