Timber
Tim Kappel and Loren Wells of Wells Kappel LLP were the attorneys behind a recent copyright-termination lawsuit that saw songwriter Cyril Vetter re-acquire the global rights to a hit song he’d unknowingly signed away — for one dollar — in his youth. Variety welcomes responsible commentary, send submissions to music@variety.com.
One afternoon in the summer of 1962, Cyril Vetter and Don Smith convened around a piano to write a song. The result was a playful tune titled “Double Shot (of My Baby’s Love).” Filled with as many double entendres as the duo could cram in, the song went on to become, in the words of Bruce Springsteen, the “greatest fraternity rock song of all time.” Over the ensuing decades, countless artists recorded their own versions — one, by the Swinging Medallions, hit No. 17 on the Billboard Hot 100 — and it remains, to this day, an indelible piece of pre-counter-culture Americana.
Upon the song’s completion, however, Vetter and Smith knew nothing of the eventual worth of their work. Without legal guidance of any sort, they sold their rights in the composition to a music publisher in exchange for a single dollar. Although their creation entered the pantheon of American music, the duo never had another hit song, and they both moved on to other careers.
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Such stories are all too common. Many creators of important cultural works sell (or give away) their interests early on, when the value of their efforts is still unknown and unknowable. With this in mind, for nearly 200 years, American copyright law has provided all “authors” (songwriters, artists, photographers, playwrights, etc.) the ability to recapture hastily assigned rights. The 1909 Copyright Act divided a copyright’s life into two 28-year terms, with the “renewal” term reserved for the creator or their heirs. After the Supreme Court weakened this protection (holding that authors could assign away their renewal rights at the same time as the initial assignment), Congress expressly redressed the Court’s ruling in the 1976 Copyright Act, which still governs our nation’s copyright protection today.
Lawmakers provided a new, simpler solution: authors now have the unequivocal and unwaivable right to terminate any assignment after a certain number of years. For most authors, it’s 35 years after the assignment was made. For authors of pre-1978 works like “Double Shot,” it’s 56 years.
In 2022, Vetter took advantage of these protections and terminated his prior assignment of the copyright in “Double Shot.” (Smith passed away in 1972.) After initial resistance, the then-current owner of the song, Resnik Music Group, agreed that the termination was valid but refused to acknowledge its full scope. Arguing that Vetter’s termination only took effect within the United States, Resnik continued to claim the exclusive right to exploit the copyright in all 180 nations with which the U.S. has international copyright relations. In practice, this would give Resnik control — and, indeed, veto power — over many common exploitations that cannot be strictly limited geographically.
Unwilling to accept this premise, Vetter brought suit, seeking a declaratory judgment that his termination returned everything he had assigned. As his attorneys, we proudly filed the lawsuit on his behalf.
In a first-of-its-kind decision, Judge Shelly Dick found that Cyril’s position was supported by the law. On renewal rights under the 1909 Act, the court stated that “the renewal right provide[s] the author or his heirs a completely new estate, clear of any rights that the author granted away during the original copyright term.” With respect to termination rights under the 1976 Act, the court determined that “a termination of a worldwide grant results in the recapture of worldwide rights; in other words, worldwide rights were covered by the terminated grant, so worldwide rights revert upon termination.” The judge’s ruling returns to Vetter the full scope of rights that he regrettably transferred away in his youth. We believe this is what Congress intended.
To be clear, many publishers and labels in the music industry support Resnik’s position — after all, it grants them perpetual control over valuable assets. But the laws of copyright recapture were designed to benefit creators and their heirs, not corporate owners. Some in the industry have accused Judge Dick’s ruling of sowing “chaos” in the international music business. In our view, this is both hyperbolic and speculative. But to the extent that the decision has a financially disruptive effect on the industry, perhaps companies have become too comfortable retaining rights that Congress clearly believed should be returned.
Other detractors have suggested that the judge simply doesn’t “get it” when it comes to copyright or the music business. This knee-jerk dismissiveness reflects a hubris that we believe our industry could do without. Whether you agree with it or not, Judge Dick’s ruling in favor of our client is unquestionably meticulous and reasoned. It delivers a fundamentally just result that protects the very people who make all of our jobs possible in the first place.
We encourage all our industry peers to read the decision with an open mind and with creators’ best interests at heart. At a time when so many in the music industry publicly claim to put artists and songwriters first, this ruling presents an opportunity to prove it. Rather than continuing to fight against authors’ interests, the industry should wholeheartedly embrace their efforts to get a true second chance to fully benefit from their works. We certainly do.