September 13, 2019
Rosemberg Law successfully opposed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit it brought on behalf of its client, James Mtume, a world-renowned jazz and R&B recording artist, to recover his masters and copyright ownership in several of his seminal recordings. Rosemberg Law’s lawsuit, pending in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, seeks to settle a matter of first impression, specifically, whether “gap grants”—pre-1978 agreements to convey copyrights in works that were not created until after 1978—such as the ones its client made to defendant, a global music conglomerate, are terminable under section 203 of the Copyright Act. The Court permitted the case to proceed in the face of a motion by the defendant arguing that gap grants are not terminable pursuant to the relevant statute, and thus, that it ought to be able to continue to extract profits from the intellectual property of the Firm’s client and countless other similarly situated recording artists.