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HughPickens.com [hughpickens.com] writes:

The Toronto Star reports that after losing the publishing rights to the Beatles’ catalogue decades ago, Paul McCartney is poised to fire another fusillade in his battle to reclaim his music [thestar.com], taking advantage of a law that allows singers to reclaim publishing rights after 56 years by filing a “notice of termination” with the U.S. Copyright Office. The songs on the table include many Beatles masterworks, including “Hey Jude” and “Revolution” — and, for the record, “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da,” a song that John Lennon openly and vocally detested [wikipedia.org]. The Beatles lost their publishing rights in the 1960s when ATV, a publishing company they created with the other Beatles, their manager and outside investors, was sold without their knowledge. McCartney failed to buy ATV in a $20-million deal with Lennon’s widow Yoko Ono and Michael Jackson bought it in for $47.5 million in 1985 [ultimateclassicrock.com]. McCartney wasn’t happy. “Someone rang me up one day and said, ‘Michael’s bought your songs,’ ” McCartney later said. “I said, ‘What??!!’ I think it’s dodgy to do things like that . . . To be someone’s friend and then to buy the rug they’re standing on.”

McCartney’s notice of termination is an attempt to get the rug back. The U.S. Copyright Act of 1976 gave songwriters the ability to recapture the publishers’ share of their songs, and in the case of titles written before 1978, writers can recapture songs after two consecutive 28-year terms, or 56 years [billboard.com]. As the world found out in 2012 when Mad Men paid $250,000 to use “Tomorrow Never Knows” [rollingstone.com] at the end of one episode, Beatles songs are not “exploited” cheaply. “Whatever people think, this is not about money. It never is," says Matthew Weiner. "They are concerned about their legacy and their artistic impact.”

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