Mandatory 100-percent licensing of jointly owned works would contravene the basic rule adopted in the 1976 Act that ownership of copyright, and the exclusive rights comprised in a copyright, are divisible without limitation. The Act provides that a copyright may be transferred to another person “in whole or in part,” and that exclusive rights, “including any subdivision of any of the rights,” may be transferred and owned separately. Thus, as one court has described it, a copyright may be “chopped up and owned separately, and each separate owner of a subdivided exclusive right may sue to enforce that owned portion of an exclusive right, no matter how small.”
Comments closed