Come on, protect the motherland / In the navy

A cou­ple of inter­est­ing posts on the 1709 copy­right blog, which — for my trainspot­ting sins and fas­ci­na­tion with all things music copy­right — I follow.

First up, from a cou­ple of weeks back, was this US deci­sion on the United States copy­right law pro­vi­sions that poten­tially allow all artists to reclaim (with restric­tions) all copy­right assigned to a pub­lisher or a label after 35 years. The first of these come up next year, and the ram­i­fi­ca­tions for the majors are massive.

In the first defin­ing strike, Vic­tor Willis, the lead singer of The Vil­lage Peo­ple, has reclaimed his share of all those songs we all kinda liked but refused to admit to (unless we were drunk).

Chief Judge Barry T. Moskowitz in the Fed­eral Dis­trict Court in Los Ange­les rejected the song pub­lish­ers’ claim that Mr. Willis was not eli­gi­ble to reclaim his share of own­er­ship of “YMCA” whose lyrics he wrote, and 32 other songs recorded by the Vil­lage Peo­ple say­ing “The pur­pose of the Act was to safe­guard authors against unre­mu­ner­a­tive trans­fers and address the unequal bar­gain­ing posi­tion of authors.

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