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Judges restart legal battle between Ray Charles’ Foundation and heirs

By | Published on Tuesday 4 August 2015

Ray Charles

Three judges in the US District Court of Central California have reignited a legal battle between the Ray Charles Foundation and the late great soul man’s children which will test some of the specifics of the so called termination right in US copyright law.

As previously reported, American copyright law gives creators who assign their work to another party the right to reclaim the transferred copyrights 35 years later, subject to various conditions and processes. Though this right only really kicked in recently, having originally been added to US copyright rules 37 years ago in 1978.

Before his death, Ray Charles decided that his Foundation should receive all the royalty payments generated by his songs, which were still controlled by his music publishing partners, principally Warner/Chappell. He then set up a separate trust fund for his children, which would pay out to his decedents on the condition that they waived any further claim to his estate, so that the Foundation would be assured its regular income from his songwriting royalty cheques.

But then the termination right kicked in, and some of Charles’s children decided to begin the termination process, which would revert ownership of his songs to them rather than Warner/Chappell, allowing them to strike up their own publishing deal and do what they like with any income it generated; ie the Foundation would lose its revenue stream.

The Foundation went legal to try to stop that from happening, initially arguing that Charles had written his songs on a work for hire basis for Warner/Chappell, so there was no termination right (‘work for hire’ being a common tactic for circumventing the termination rule). When that argument failed, the charity simply said that Charles’s children were going back on an agreement they made with their father before his death over what would happen to his assets and estate.

In 2013, the courts ruled in favour of the Charles family, mainly on the basis that the Foundation, as a mere beneficiary of the Ray Charles song repertoire, couldn’t interfere in the termination process, which was between Charles’s children and Warner/Chappell.

The charity quickly pledged to appeal, leading to last week’s ruling that said the Foundation should be allowed to challenge the Charles children’s bid to reclaim their father’s copyright. Legal types are now likely to watch the new chapter of this case closely because, despite a few case specific quandaries, it should test the more general question as to whether beneficiaries of a copyright – who are not party to the actual assignment contract between songwriter and publisher – can nevertheless have an impact on termination requests.

So, one to watch then.



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