Who’s Gotten Their Copyright Back?
Currently in the United States, an author’s copyright expires 70 years after the author’s death or 95 years after its first publication. But what about when an author of a work grants their exclusive copyright to a publisher or some other partnership? In that case, an author can request that the work’s copyright revert to their sole ownership after 35 years.
It’s called reversion, and it doesn’t happen often, because it’s not automatic; there are legal hurdles to jump through to file copyright termination notices, meaning you need money, help, and strong motivation to make it happen. And in some famous cases (see virtually every famous superhero ever), if you’ve created something as a work for hire, copyright termination alone isn’t always going to get it done. But it does happen, and it’s interesting to see (and to measure, at scale) in just what cases it comes together.
That’s the subject of a new academic study by Joshua Yuvaraj, Rebecca Giblin, Daniel Russo-Batterham, and Genevieve Grant. The authors also created a complete dataset of copyright termination notices from 1978 to 2020 for other researchers to parse; their initial findings are summarized here by Cory Doctorow.
