Siegel

ORDER DENYING PLAINTIFFS’ MOTION FOR RECONSIDERATION; ORDER DENYING DEFENDANTS’ MOTION FOR RECONSIDERATION; ORDER AMENDING COURT’S AUGUST 12, 2009, ORDER

DEFENDANTS’ MOTION FOR RECONSIDERATION

Despite having been passed more than thirty-three years ago, the termination provisions in the 1976 Copyright Act have been little utilized by authors or their heirs and, consequently, little explored by the courts. See William F. Patry, The Failure of the American Copyright System: Protecting the Idle Rich, 72 Notre Dame L.Rev. 907, 922 (1997) (“by not making termination automatic and requiring authors to jump through hoops even more formidable than those renewal presented” under the 1909 Act, the consequence is that, “in practice, the termination right has” been “barely used,” with “approximately 0.72% of [termination] transfers hav[ing] been recorded, as required, with the Copyright Office”); see also Deck Jeremy N. Williams ¶ 6 (noting that even for a company with as diverse and large a catalog of copyrighted properties as Warner Bros., it has only received 65 termination notices since the late 1980s, or roughly only three termination notices a year).

This is also true of the limited…