Doctrine of Indivisibility

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The introduction to this article provides insufficient context for those unfamiliar with the subject. Please help improve the article with a good introductory style.

This article is orphaned as few or no other articles link to it. Please help introduce links in articles on related topics. (March 2007)

This article does not cite any references or sources. (March 2007) Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unverifiable material may be challenged and removed.

This is a legal doctrine that existed up through and including the Copyright Act of 1909. The doctrine held that a copyright was a single, indivisible right that could only be assigned in whole. The policy concern was that a defendant might find himself facing claims from multiple plaintiffs, all claiming copyright in the same work. Despite the indivisibility, a copyright holder could still effectively assign certain rights. The assignees of those rights were held to be "mere licensees."

The result of the doctrine could yield a harsh result for an exclusive licensee in a work. If a third party infringed the work, the copyright holder had no motivation to file suit---the work was no longer marketable. So courts allowed exclusive licensees to compulsively join the copyright holder as a plaintiff in such suits. Non-exclusive licensees could not forcefully join copyright holders, on the theory that in those cases, the work was still marketable and the copyright holder therefore had an interest in protecting his rights.

In the case Goodis v. United Artists Television, Inc., 425 F.2d 397, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit held that the doctrine of indivisibility could not operate to wholly deprive an author of his copyright when a "mere licensee" secured a copyright in a collective work but the author never secured a separate copyright on his own.

The Doctrine of Indivisibility was expressly eliminated in the Copyright Act of 1976. Assignees of rights in a copyrighted work now have standing to directly file suit against infringers.