Whether the rights of co-authors in a joint work under the Copyright Act can be severed by the subsequent use made by a licensee

QUESTIONS PRESENTED Petitioner plaintiff Peter Brownstein is the coauthor of the LCID, a “joint work” first fixed in 1994 and licensed for a 20-year term to defendant Ethnic Technologies (“ET”), and used to create a further derivative work known as the E-Tech. The LCID analyzed bulk name and address lists and drew conclusions about individuals’ ethnicity, language and religion, a process referred to as encoding. Brownstein wrote the original mainframe computer programs to automate the encoding process, which yielded the first commercially viable product The principal issue raised here is the transformative nature of a joint work under the Copyright Act, creating a single unified whole from its parts; as opposed to the creation of derivative works that add to an existing work, but which are not integrated into a single work. A joint work under the Copyright Act creates a single, indivisible work. Brownstein sued to enforce his rights in the joint work and an accounting for his share of the license revenue generated since 2010. The questions presented are: 1. Once a joint work is fixed, are the rights of the co-authors as the statutory co-owners of the copyrights in that work severable such that a co-author is required to prove actual use by a licensee of the coauthor’s personal contribution? In other words, can the rights of co-authors during the life of the copyright be severed by the subsequent use made by the licensee? Or, as Brownstein contends, does the statute work give ii QUESTIONS PRESENTED — Continued birth to a new, indivisible work, jointly owned by the co-authors? 2. Does the fact that a joint work is also a derivative work vitiate the statutory grant of co-ownership of copyrights? 3. Must a valid written assignment of copyright contain words of conveyance that clearly indicate an intention to transfer one or more of the exclusive copyrights?