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7 UCLA Ent. L. Rev. [i] (1999-2000)

handle is hein.journals/uclaetrlr7 and id is 1 raw text is: UCLA ENTERTAINMENT LAW REVIEW Volume 7 Issue 1 Fall 1999 ARTICLES Who Owns the Movies? Joint Authorship under the Copyright Act of 1976 after Childress v. Taylor and Thomson v. Larson Seth F. Gorman* .................. • ..... 1 A substantial split among the federal courts has arisen with respect to the ap- propriate test for determining who are the authors for purposes of copyright in joint collaborative endeavors with numerous contributors such as film productions and plays. With authorship comes the full rights to exploit the work independently of the other contributors, subject to an accounting, and the rights to an accounting of profits from the other author(s). The conflict between the courts crystallizes when lesser contributors, without work for hire agreements in large productions, claim co- authorship rights under copyright law. Courts are hesitant to afford the broad rights that come from deeming the work a joint work and the contributors co-authors. Accordingly, the law of joint authorship has evolved without much reason in a form equivalent to I know it when I see it. This article discusses the split among the courts and their analyses. It then analyzes the 1976 Copyright Act against the back- drop of the changes made to the 1909 Copyright Act to conclude that Congress did not intend the test for joint-authorship to differ from the strict statutory language.

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