IMSLP Forums

Looking at the chart posted here ....

Suppose an individual writes a work for a corporation. Sells it to the corporation. Her name is on the title page, but the copyright has always been owned by a corporation that never had any other dealings with the composer.

In Canada, the copyright lasts during the composer's life plus 50 years from the composer's year of death?
This seems to imply that, to determine the continuing validity of the copyright, the corporation must keep track of the composer (with whom it has no continuing relationship), possibly for six or seven decades after the work was produced. Is that correct?

In the theoretical or hypothetical sense your post seems to imply, the corporation would prefer that human beings are immortal, so that works for hire never fall out of copyright…

<rant mode=enabled>
In the real world, by the time 50 or 70 (or some other arbitrary number of) years have elapsed since the death of the artistic creator, only a tiny percentage of all the possible works dating from that time are still commercially viable concerns that provide a financial income stream to the corporation… so if you’re the estate of Walter Elias Disney, with a tiny fraction of your accumulated wealth you can effectively bribe your country’s government to change the (already baroque and tortuous) copyright laws to the direct advantage of your several marketable pieces of intellectual property, and to the gross disadvantage of all the other created cultural artifacts of similar vintage that are no longer commercially viable, and which can by the same perversion of the law be denied from entering the public domain which would be the natural state where they could be utilised as the common artistic heritage of everyone. And then you can influence your country to impose copyright colonialism on all your neighbouring states and major trading partners.
</rant>

Pragmatically, if a piece of intellectual property is valuable enough, the corporation (or someone else) will go to sufficient lengths to establish the extent of copyright protection. The actual cases where a corporation has no idea whether copyright still appertains is usually when there is no commercial aspect to the property.

So yes, consider company A, which in the 1990s purchased company B, which in the 1960s amalgamated from companies C and D, of which company D way back in 1923 published a work by Federicus Knerkenberk. Suppose Knerkenberk lived to the year in which I was born, 1972; the published work (originally by company D) would remain under copyright (but having been sold and resold, would now be managed by company A) until the year 2023 in Canada (and possibly 2019 in the US if company D was good at doing its copyright notices and renewals back in olden times). I’ll leave it up to you to guess how realistic it is that:
a) Knerkenberk might be typical of 20th century creators of intellectual property;
b) whether company A really cares about enforcing the copyright EXCEPT for the instances where they think they aren’t getting the money they assume is due to them.

Alternatively, perhaps Knerkenberk never sold the work outright to the corporation, but instead made an agreement to allow him to collect a small percentage of returns as royalties. 88 years later on, Knerkenberk’s great-great-grandson might have lived a considerable life of luxury since 1972 by being the heir of the Knerkenberk royalties (if they were commercially viable) and thus he might want to reissue a grrrande, critical revision of the collected works of Knerkenberk, expertly designed to incorporate a new set of copyrightable editorial additions, issued just before the expiry of the original copyright in 2023, in order to generate a new income stream of stale but slightly rebaked intellectual property (replacing the old editions) with new copyrights persisting beyond 2023... anything is possible (including the horrific death of Federicus Knerkenberk IV in a fire, like that litigious member of Rachmaninov’s family descendants we heard of recently).

Cynically yours, PML

Not sure I understand this, though I would like to get clarification, just for general knowledge.

The way I understood it, even once a copyright is assigned to a corporation, the copyright term is still tied to the death date of the composer, although at certain times in history, extensions could be applied, for instance, in France where years were added on depending on war etc. But the total years, if there were extensions, still hinged on the death date of the composer. Not so?

If not, can someone clarify? Is there is a different copyright law for corporations? Thanks.

p.s. exception to this would be pre-1923 public domain rule for U.S.

The corporate copyright referred to on the bottom chart applies only to anonymous works and is really pretty limited in scope. The type of works which typically fall under this category are catalogs or other works whose authors are employees of the corporation creating the work as part of their regular employment - published anonymously. The corporation itself is listed as the "author", as the actual authors are anonymous employees. If the actual author is credited as such, even if the work was created as an employee of the corporation, the usual life-plus-50 term applies instead of the publication-plus-50 term.

In the USA, there is also a category known as a "work made for hire." There have been a fair number of cases in the US where music publishers have played dirty tricks on composers - especially in popular music - by offering a publishing contract defining the work listed as a "work made for hire" - which literally assigns the entire copyright over to the publisher, as opposed the more common arrangement of a partial assignation of rights. The fact that a corporate entity is listed as the copyright owner in the notice does not determine the copyright term used, as long as an author is actually credited with authorship - even if the credited author signed away his or her copyright as a "work made for hire."