Law Commons^™

Are We Serious About Performers' Rights?, Mary Lafrance

Scholarly Works

Do performers have rights in the expressive works they help to create? Historically, the rights of performers have received far less attention that the rights of traditional authors. The law has been reluctant to recognize performers as authors and, to the extent that performers’ rights are recognized, they are secondary to, and more limited than, the rights of traditional authors. Recent developments, however, have brought performers’ intellectual property rights to the forefront. For a number of reasons, performers in the United States have increasingly begun to assert authorship rights in the works they help to create. In addition, recent international …

Authorship And Termination Rights In Sound Recordings, Mary Lafrance

Scholarly Works

In late 1999, Congress amended the definition of "works made for hire" in § 101 of the Copyright Act to make explicit its intent to include sound recordings as a category of works eligible for this status. The amendment was repealed with retroactive effect less than a year later. All this happened—pardon the expression—in record time.

This odd course of events was precipitated by a request from the record industry, represented by the Recording Industry Association of America ("RIAA"), which persuaded Congress, shortly before passage of the Intellectual Property and Omnibus Communications Reform Act of 1999, to add a "technical …

Authorship, Dominance, And The Captive Collaborator: Preserving The Rights Of Joint Authors, Mary Lafrance

Scholarly Works

For copyright purposes, determining whether a work has a single author or joint authors is important for a variety of reasons. Perhaps the most significant legal consequence of joint authorship is joint ownership, under which the authors enjoy equal and undivided ownership of the copyright, allowing each to exploit the work freely, subject to a duty to account to the others for a ratable share of the exploitation profits. Absent an agreement to the contrary, each author of a joint work has an equal claim to those profits and an equal right to exploit the work, even if the authors' …