US court says Toni Basil is sole owner of Mickey masters

completemusicupdate.com:

The Ninth Circuit appeals court in the US last week ruled that Toni Basil is the sole owner of the recording copyright in her hit song ‘Mickey’ as part of a long-running dispute around the good old termination right in American copyright law.That termination right allows artists and songwriters who assign – or transfer the ownership of – copyrights to record companies and music publishers to terminate the assignment after 35 years, so to reclaim the rights, albeit only within the US.On the songs side of the music industry, the termination of old publishing contracts in the US has become quite routine, with writers reclaiming copyrights they assigned to publishers 35 years ago.But on the recordings side there is the added complication of needing to identify who was the original default owner of any one sound recording copyright.

In some cases labels claim they were actually that original default owner, meaning no assignment of rights from artist to label ever took place, meaning there is no assignment to terminate.The rules around the default ownership of sound recording copyrights vary from country to country.

Under US law the default owner are the performers and/or producers that have made creative contributions to the record. Unless, that is, the recording is made on a ‘work-for-hire’ basis, so the performer and producer are basically hired to do the recording, in which case whoever hired them is the default owner.In various cases where artists have tried to terminate old record deals, the labels have insisted those deals were work-for-hire agreements, making the label the default owner of the copyright, meaning there is nothing to terminate.