Source: http://zvirosen.com/2016/12/
Timestamp: 2019-04-26 01:53:27+00:00

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The New York (State) Court of Appeals (“COA”) recently issued an opinion on the question that had been certified to them from the Federal Second Circuit Court of Appeals, where the COA was asked to state whether New York common-law provides a right of public performance to sound recordings, and if it does, what the contours of that right are. The case is captioned Flo & Eddie v. SiriusXM, and you can get the whole backstory here.
As folks who have been following my scholarship may know, I’ve been working on a extensive article on the problem of common-law copyright as applied to sound recordings in the 21st century for a few years now. Due to a series of legal and legislative decisions in the first decade of the twentieth century, sound recordings had no protection under federal copyright law until a 1971 amendment, which applied only to sound recordings made February 15, or thereafter, leaving state common-law copyright as the main source of legal protection for sound recordings against unauthorized exploitation until that point. Common-law copyright is limited to unpublished works, but a consensus emerged among the courts that a sound recording is unpublished for purposes of common-law copyright no matter how many copies of that recording are sold.
I completed a draft a few months ago (forthcoming and currently being edited by the University of Cincinnati Law Review – note that the draft online is still a bit rough), where I examined the question of whether common-law copyright includes an exclusive right to perform a work publicly, and whether that right is dependent on such a right existing at federal law. I chose the 1880s as a period to study in detail, because it offers the most closely analogous period to the current situation in terms of the law – musical compositions did not have a performance right under federal law until 1897, just as sound recordings only have a limited performance right under federal law today. I was curious as to whether courts found that unpublished musical works nonetheless had a performance right at common law before the 1897 federal amendment. What I found was unanimous – a surprising number of both reported decisions and unreported dispositions where courts found that common-law provided a performance right to musical compositions, regardless of what federal law provided.
This result was even more remarkable considering that many of these works (mostly light opera) were by non-American composers, who were not eligible for any copyright protection whatsoever in the United States until 1891, and yet American Courts were not only protecting their unpublished works at common law, they were extending performance rights to their works that published musical works that had been registered for copyright did not receive.
Following that inquiry I then launched a broader study of common-law copyright more generally, and discovered that although common-law copyright often acts similarly to statutory copyright, it is different in many pertinent ways, all of which provide broader protection. For instance, common-law copyright likely provides moral rights of attribution and integrity, which federal law only provides in a limited way under the Visual Artists Rights Act.
I was therefore disappointed to read the COA opinion. Briefly, four Justices of the New York Court of Appeals held that New York common law does not provide a right of public performance to sound recordings. One justice concurred, but would have held that there may be a performance right at common-law regarding “on demand” services like Spotify. Two justices dissented, stating they would have recognized a performance right in sound recordings at common-law.
The majority opinion of the Court of Appeals speaks for itself, but the crux of the opinion is the question as to why this issue is only being raised in 2016, when the issue of performance rights in sound recordings could have been raised for almost a century. However, as the opinion tacitly acknowledges, rightsholders did attempt to assert performance rights at common law during the latter part of the 1930s through 1940, when performers and radio were locked in a bitter struggle over the use of recordings instead of live musicians for radio broadcast. In 1937 the Pennsylvania Supreme Court enjoined a radio station performing sound recordings created by the plaintiff. However, three years later the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, in an opinion in RCA v. Whiteman by the famed Judge Learned Hand, held that any common-law rights in the sound recording ended when it was sold.
However, fifteen years later in 1955, the Second Circuit overruled Whiteman, and held that sale of records does not constitute a publication that destroys a work’s rights at common-law in the decision of Capitol v. Mercury. The New York Court of Appeals unambiguously affirmed this holding regarding publication a half-century later, in 2005’s Capitol v. Naxos decision.
To put this history another way, when recording artists were opposed to their records being played on radio, they were active litigants to preserve these rights, until a 1940 ruling called these rights into question. By the time that ruling was reversed in 1955, recording artists were desperate to get radio airplay, and the idea of suing radio stations for playing music without paying additional royalties in the era of payola was simply asinine. It was only when Sirius and Pandora stopped paying royalties on pre-1972 sound recordings circa 2012 that the lawsuits began. Common-law copyright has always had public performance as part of its bundle of rights, regardless of what federal law provides, and failure to litigate when it would be contrary to good business does not destroy that right.
In search of support for its conclusion that common law does not include a performance right for sound recordings, the Court of Appeals attempts to argue that Whiteman remains good law regarding performance rights, and was only modified by Mercury to protect reproduction of records. However this attempted hybrid of these cases requires a willful blindness of what Whiteman actually says. The Whiteman case analyzes common law rights from the perspective of whether or not they exist, and having found that the commercial sale of the records constituted publication, determined that no rights existed at common law. The Whiteman case makes no effort to split up the bundle of rights contained in common-law copyright, and makes no indication that performance might be a different question from reproduction at common law. 2 As the New York Court of Appeals expressly rejected that approach to publication in Naxos, following its rejection by the Second Circuit a half century earlier, it is unclear what relevance Whiteman has anymore.
Indeed, the majority opinion of the COA is unprecedented – for the first time I have seen a Court has found a major limitation to the protections granted by common-law copyright. Looking at the underlying nature of common-law copyright, such a holding is surprising. As a doctrine focused on pre-publication protection for works, the idea that they only have protection against duplication makes precious little sense. As we have seen many times, playing a leaked rough cut of a song on the radio on the radio is deeply problematic. Admittedly, the idea that sound recordings are not published even after they have been sold commercially is the most problematic aspect of the common-law copyright doctrine for sound recordings, but that is not at issue in this case, because the COA has unambiguously recognized this legal fiction. Legally, playing a commercially sold pre-1972 sound recording on Sirius is no different from playing a studio bootleg – either way you’re infringing rights absent an agreement with the owner of the sound recording common law rights.
One other thing, acknowledged by the COA, is that this decision creates a split with Pennsylvania, whose common law has recognized a common-law performance right since 1937.3 It is difficult to predict what complications will arise from this, but the thought of fifty states with different rules for public performance of sound recordings makes the federalization of pre-1972 sound recordings recommended by the Copyright Office sound even more tempting.
This is a complicated issue, and I’ve simplified a number of things (explained at greater length in the article draft) for purposes of writing a readable blog post. If people would like clarification on anything, I’d be happy to provide it in the comments.
Author Zvi S. RosenPosted on December 20, 2016 September 28, 2017 Categories Case Files Scanned from the ArchivesLeave a comment on Case Files from the Archives; Vol 2: Folsom v. Marsh, Gilbert & Sullivan, and More!
I’m pleased to announce one of the first fruits of a partnership between the Boston Public Library, National Archives at Waltham, and the Internet Archive.1 At my suggestion, they’ve begun digitizing the case files for a number of copyright cases that I thought were particularly worth seeing from before 1923. The National Archives at Waltham includes federal court records from all of New England, but I limited my list of cases to the First Circuit – so if there are suggestions for cases from Connecticut or Vermont, feel free to leave them in the comments or just tell me directly. I’ve also only requested case files from cases before 1923 to avoid any possible copyright issues, at least for now.
The first casefile to come online is the file for Pierce & Bushnell Mfg. Co. v. Werckmeister, 72 F. 54 (1st Cir. 1896), which reversed Werckmeister v. Pierce & Bushnell Mfg. Co., 63 F. 445 (C.C.D. Mass. 1894). Briefly put, the case involved photographic reproduction of a painting entitled “Die Heilige Cacilie” by the German artist Gustav Naujok, who assigned all reproduction rights to Photographische Gesellschaft Berlin, which in turn photographed the work, copyrighted the photograph with the Librarian of Congress, and inscribed the notice required under the 1870 Copyright Act, as amended in 1891. The painting depicts “the patron saint of music, St. Cecilia, sitting before an organ, and cherubs dropping flowers, and by means of the artistic coloring of the picture and the expression in the face of St. Cecilia, express emblematically the power of sacred music.” Case File, Transcript of Record at 1. It was undisputed that Pierce & Bushnell Mfg. Co. had made copies of the work without permission. However, upon suit by Emil Werckmeister, a principal of Photographische Gesellschaft Berlin, Pierce & Bushnell argued that the copyright was invalid, because no copyright notice was inscribed on the original painting, and that it had been publicly exhibited without that notice before any copyright was registered.
The Circuit Court for the District of Massachusetts (sitting as a trial court, as it would in certain matters until 1911) disagreed with the defendants, and held that the copyright was valid, and that copyright notice only needed to be inscribed on copies of a work, not on the original. The case file thus shows the case presented to the then-new First Circuit Court of Appeals – including the main and supplemental briefs of both parties, the transcript of record including interrogatories taken as part of the litigation. Unfortunately, it does not seem that any example of the photograph at issue is included.
The Circuit Court of Appeals would overturn the trial court, and hold that notice was required on the original painting. However, the Supreme Court would overrule that result in a different case, also involving Werckmeister, in 1907. American Tobacco Co. v. Werckmeister, 207 U.S. 284 (1907).
Lots more coming, including (I hope) the case file from Folsom v. Marsh.
Although we tend to think of the idea of a modern appeals court focused on intellectual property issues as a recent phenomenon, in fact there had been attempts as early as 1878 create a specialized patent court.1 The issue of the complexity of intellectual property matters, especially patent law, was already apparent, and this was exacerbated by the creation of the Circuit Courts of Appeal in 1891, and the immediate circuit splits that ensued on patent law and other issues.
Despite some support in industry publications like The American Machinist, this bill never went anywhere, but it was hardly the end of the issue, and bills to create specialized trial or appellate courts for intellectual property would continue for years to come. The failure of the US Commerce Court in 1913 put a bit of a dent in the push for specialized Article 3 Courts generally, including the push for a specialized court in intellectual property. The addition of patent jurisdiction to the Article 1 US Court of Customs in 1929 created an appellate patent court, but only for appeals from the Patent Office, not from the District Courts. It would not be until 1982 that the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals was created to solve the problem of uniformity and expertise that had motivated Hansbrough’s proposal over 80 years earlier.

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