Overview
In an opinion today, Judge McMahon granted an interlocutory appeal on the following question:
Under New York law, do the holders of common law copyrights in pre-1972 sound recordings have, as part of the bundle of rights attendant to their copyright, the right to exclusive public performance of those sound recordings?She concluded, under the standards for interlocutory appeal, that there were substantial grounds for a difference of opinion on the issue:
[The plaintiff] correctly observes that substantial ground does not exist for differences of opinion merely because an issue is one of first impression about which little case law exists. But here there is far more than a previously unaddressed question of law. There is in fact a difficult legal question about which reasonable minds can differ. The Court held that under New York law the right to publicly perform sound recordings is part of the bundle of rights associated with common law copyrights in those recordings. That conclusion was reached primarily upon consideration of New York's treatment of common law copyrights in other types of works. But while this Court believes it reached the correct result, I appreciate that another judge might feel differently. In this regard, I note particularly that federal statutory copyrights in sound recordings did not come with an associated right to exclusive public performance until Congress passed a law in 1995, which provided a limited "exclusive right[] ... to perform [copyrighted sound recordings] publicly by means of a digital audio transmission." 17 U.S.C. § 106; see Digital Performance Right in Sound Recordings Act of 1995, Pub. L. 104-39, 109 Stat. 336. Between 1971, when Congress first granted statutory copyright protection to sound recordings, and 1995, Congress did not include public performance rights among the specifically enumerated rights granted to holders of copyrights in sound recordings. Of course, the very fact that Congress felt compelled to carve out a statutory exception for public performance rights, by excluding them from the bundle of rights associated with copyrights in sound recordings, suggests that such rights would otherwise have existed, and so exist at common law. See Summary Judgment Decision at 20-21 & n.3. However, the complicated history of public performance rights and copyright in the discrete medium of sound recordings makes the answer to this question less than straightforward, and warrants a close look by a controlling court.Our prior posts on the case are here
