A growing number of artists have initiated the process of recapturing copyrights assigned or otherwise transferred decades ago. The impetus for this movement is Section 203 of the Copyright Act of 1976, which permits artists to terminate the transfer of copyrights 35 years after the transfer of those rights, as long as the rights were transferred on or after Jan. 1, 1978. Applying simple arithmetic, the window for artists to recapture their copyrights under Section 203 opened on Jan. 1, 2013. However, this is where the simplicity ends. What remains is a complex process that artists and their attorneys will have to navigate to recapture their copyrights.

Section 203

Section 203 was included in the Copyright Act of 1976 to safeguard artists against “unremunerative transfers.” According to the accompanying House Report, a revised recapture provision was necessary to address the inadequacies of prior reversionary provisions and “the unequal bargaining position of authors, resulting in part from the impossibility of determining a work’s value until it has been exploited.” In essence, Section 203 provides a second chance for artists and their heirs to exploit their works despite a prior transfer of lucrative copyrights to those with greater skill and resources in marketing and distributing those works to the public.

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